Netflix And Max Are Betting Big on Wrestling — Here’s Why

Last year, two of the biggest media companies on the planet spent a fortune to bring live professional wrestling to their streaming platforms. Netflix dropped $5 billion to become the new home of WWE’s flagship program, Monday Night Raw, in the United States — and their entire universe of weekly shows and monthly “Premium Live Events” internationally — for the next decade. That’s actually a bargain for a company who measures success in hours, given that WWE produces between 7 and 10 hours of live programming each week, all year round, for an audience that’s remained steady even as the rest of linear television has struggled. (Over the next 10 years that $5 billion works out to roughly $2 million an hour, compared to the $200 million Netflix spent on the Dwayne Johnson-Gal Gadot-Ryan Rynolds movie Red Notice, runtime 118 minutes.) Even WWE’s much smaller competition All Elite Wrestling was able to secure a reported $555 million from Warner Bros. Discovery to expand their cable broadcast deal into the streaming world beginning this week. Wrestlers like Jon Moxley and Toni Storm will now rub elbows with John Oliver and Tony Soprano on Max. 

Wrestling’s appeal to broadcasting companies is obvious. It has a rabid, pre-sold audience which will tune in week after week for a live show that has the immediacy of competitive sports without the off-season. But the arrival of America’s favorite pretend sport to major streamers on a weekly basis presents an opportunity for uninitiated viewers to discover why wrestling has gotten its claws so deeply into the American psyche. Not only is wrestling more easily accessible than it’s been in decades, it’s also arguably better than it’s ever been, and conditions are set for it to reach a new level of mainstream obsession. 

To an outsider, it can seem unfathomable that something as silly as pro wrestling could transfix viewers across the deeply divided American cultural landscape, from flag-waving midwesterners to working-class coastal immigrants to a shocking number of bearded, bespectacled Brooklyn hipster journalists like myself. The secret of wrestling’s appeal is that it is base, elemental entertainment built around simple values and the universal struggle to achieve against tall odds. It can be enjoyed on the most superficial level without missing much text, but it gets more and more fascinating the deeper you study it.

Like animation or comics, professional wrestling is often mistaken for a genre, but is actually a medium for storytelling, albeit a relatively rigid one. Comparisons are made between wrestling and soap operas, superhero comics, drag, burlesque, even ballet (despite the ubiquitous industry motto, “This ain’t ballet”). But if you’re talking about mainstream American wrestling on TV, then the best analogy is a sports movie: a narrative about characters seeking to achieve greatness in a physical competition. As with a movie, the audience is encouraged to identify with some characters, revile others, and become invested in a contest the outcome of which is scripted. But unlike in a movie, the athletes are (more or less) actually doing the things you’re seeing them do on screen. In fact you can go and watch them perform these daring feats live and in person. They can hear your cheers from the stands and convince you that you are giving them the strength to fight on.

In the long term, your support does actually make them more powerful, as a wrestler’s popularity ultimately determines how a promotion like WWE or AEW writes (or “books,” in wrestling jargon) their stories, wins, and losses. In addition to crowd response and merchandise sales, real-life injuries and backstage drama reshape the narrative in real time, creating a uniquely organic and neverending storytelling form. Like in real sports, the game goes on even after all the players you grew up with have retired. The characters you meet in professional wrestling aren’t exactly real, but they are human, and they grow up, grow old, and die. Within both the fiction of the ring and the real world in which it’s nestled, the goal of every professional wrestler is to carve out a legacy that will outlive them.

The short answer is that it’s a live TV show where people pretend to fight each other, and it’s absolutely fine — even preferable — to turn your brain off and watch (to paraphrase the great multi-time champ Big E) “big meaty men slapping meat.” Wrestling matches are, in themselves, art, a form of physical storytelling built on the same psychology as a Hollywood action sequence but with the immediate danger of a trapeze act. Great wrestlers can tell a complete story in the ring even without backstory and trash-talking, and a great match can transcend cultural and language barriers. 

But underneath this half-fake bloodsport in which the blood is real and the sport is not, there is non-stop economic intrigue, reality-show gossip, and a constantly shifting storytelling puzzle. Wrestlers are (nominally, at least) independent contractors who portray fictionalized versions of themselves on television, whose reputations are subject to the whims of the much larger corporate machines outlining their stories. To climb the ladder, they jockey for position within and between companies while also trusting their health and well-being to the people with whom they’re competing. They have each agreed to abide by the outcome of their story that was chosen by their promotion, but the stakes are, in fact, real, and the skin in the game is their own.

Thanks to social media and a hungry and aggressive wrestling press, fans know who’s friends backstage, who’s dating, and who’s got legitimate beef. And because part of wrestling is blurring the lines between fact and fiction, these real-life developments become part of the story. On the mic, wrestlers take real shots at each others’ egos and reputations in an effort to convince the viewers that there is something sincere behind their fictional rivalries. WWE has embraced the similarities between wrestling and the not-quite-reality dramas of the Real Housewives, even creating an on-ramp from the latter audience via reality shows like Total Divas and Love & WWE. All Elite Wrestling itself is, in a way, a spin-off of its co-founders’ weekly YouTube vlog Being The Elite. Storylines bleed into or even spring from interactions on Instagram or TikTok, and there’s so much content that if one isn’t careful it can easily become the majority of a fan’s media diet. (This, of course, is what Netflix and WBD are paying for.)

The metafictional appeal goes even deeper. Wrestling booking — the act of making matches that shapes the short- and long-term narratives of a wrestling promotion — is a unique storytelling challenge that excites and often baffles writers who underestimate the craft. It’s a delicate art of creating anticipation, delaying gratification, and maintaining the value and integrity of a character — who is a real person with kids to feed — while still making wins and losses feel as if they mean something. Everyone thinks they know how to book an exciting and sustainable wrestling universe, but very few people have actually managed it and the reason there’s an entire industry of pundits and podcasters who debate these decisions on a weekly, even daily basis is because the process really is that interesting.

Take for example the most fascinating storyline from this week’s much-hyped first Monday Night Raw of the Netflix era — the battle between 46-year-old industry legend CM Punk and Seth Rollins, a WWE company man who, in many respects, followed in his footsteps.

In the early 2000s, CM Punk rose to the peak of the indie wrestling scene, an exciting environment for performers who didn’t meet Vince McMahon’s rigid parameters for superstardom. (McMahon heavily favored ‘roided-out men and unnaturally busty blondes, and the 200-pound, straight-edge, tatted-up Punk didn’t fit the blueprint.) When Punk signed with WWE in 2005, he defied the odds and, seemingly despite McMahon’s efforts, became one of the most popular and longest-reigning WWE Champions of his time. Seth Rollins grew up idolizing Punk and followed directly in his footsteps, climbing the ranks in the very same independent promotion as Punk before signing with WWE, where Punk’s success had blazed a trail for a lean, athletic indie-grown wrestler like Rollins. But in 2014, just as Rollins’ star was rising, Punk walked out on his contract citing years of frustration with management. Disenchanted with wrestling, CM Punk retired from the business and publicly aired all of his grievances against WWE and members of its present roster. Rollins, who had been elevated to main event status in Punk’s absence, took this very personally.

In 2021, Punk came out of retirement and signed with All Elite Wrestling, a new big money promotion built in the image of the independent scene from which Punk had sprung. While working there, Punk took many opportunities to defame the competition, where Rollins was still a major star. But, before long, Punk’s relationship with AEW grew even more toxic than it had been with WWE, to the point that Punk had multiple unscripted physical confrontations with his co-workers. When his contract expired, Punk accepted an offer to return to WWE. This return was kept secret even from the WWE locker room, so when he made his shocking appearance at the conclusion of Survivor Series in November 2023, even the wrestlers in the ring were surprised — and in the case of Seth Rollins, absolutely furious.

(Let’s stop and acknowledge that none of the events in the above two paragraphs are fictional.)

Where many wrestling feuds are built around real-life grudges and exaggerated for dramatic purposes, if anything the beef between CM Punk and Seth Rollins has felt reigned in. To Rollins, Punk is a hypocrite who threw his wrestling family under the bus to save his own pride and then waltzed back home without so much as an apology. To Punk, Rollins is an impudent, ungrateful child, the corporate stooge that WWE would have made Punk into if he’d let them. They’re both right, they’re both angry, and on the first Raw on Netflix on January 6th, they have to hit each other just hard enough to make it look brutal without actually brutalizing each other, no matter how much they want to. 

This is what professional wrestling is. It’s like nothing else on Earth, and yet it is everything that current pop culture adores. Like reality TV, social media, or modern politics, it is theater with no fourth wall, a glitzed-up fiction that is so entangled with reality that they can’t be pulled apart. And now it’s streaming live in your pocket, multiple nights a week.