Has WWE become anoth­er cog in the Net­flix machine?

There’s a Dwayne John­son tweet that I think about a lot. It’s from Decem­ber 19^th 2024, off the back of the recent release of Red One, a film he both pro­duces and stars in. John­son described the film as hav­ing ​“a very long shelf life with mul­ti­ple ver­ti­cals – kudos to our Ama­zon part­ners for their strate­gic win, that’s just get­ting start­ed.” A cou­ple of weeks lat­er, at the begin­ning of Jan­u­ary in 2025, John­son would be part of anoth­er strate­gic win with a giant stream­ing com­pa­ny, as WWE moved to Netflix.

WWE has always been defined by its ​“Eras”, whether in the bound­ary-push­ing and edgy con­tent of the 1990s Atti­tude Era (which then-boss Vince McMa­hon would describe as ​“the cure for the com­mon show”) which intro­duced pro-wrestling to a new gen­er­a­tion of fans, or the delib­er­ate move to win over a younger audi­ence in the PG Era that began in 2008, with John Cena as the face of pro­fes­sion­al wrestling. When WWE moved into its self-pro­claimed ​“Net­flix Era” at the start of the new year, it was inevitably a big deal. There’s been a lot writ­ten about the amount of mon­ey that went into the deal (around $5 bil­lion), to the free­dom and flex­i­bil­i­ty giv­en to WWE’s biggest prime­time shows – Raw and Smack­down – in a world where they don’t need to con­tend with adver­tis­ers. Between this and the sheer scale that Net­flix offers as a plat­form, the deal on paper seems like it could only be a good thing, allow­ing WWE to move towards a big­ger, more main­stream audi­ence with­out need­ing to make the com­pro­mis­es of ear­ly eras. But as these two enor­mous cor­po­ra­tions merge with one anoth­er, there’s a sign of some­thing more trou­bling on the hori­zon: the absorp­tion of WWE into a stream­ing land­scape that’s increas­ing­ly anony­mous and cor­po­rate­ly driven.

The begin­ning of WWE’s Net­flix Era felt designed to be like the cli­max of a stu­dio block­buster fran­chise. Not only were some of the biggest names in wrestling sched­uled to fight one anoth­er at Los Ange­les’ Intu­it Dome on Jan­u­ary 6^th 2025, but the night was full to burst­ing with cameos from the great and the good of WWE past. The Under­tak­er appeared briefly to dri­ve a motor­cy­cle a few laps around the ring; John Cena took explo­sive­ly to the mic, announc­ing that while this year is his farewell tour, he might just enter the Roy­al Rum­ble to try and fight his way into Wrestle­Ma­nia (the biggest night of the year in the WWE cal­en­dar). While there were plen­ty of pleas­ant sur­pris­es, and lots of Leo-point­ing to be done, there were a few moments where the enthu­si­asm felt by the WWE and Net­flix as cor­po­ra­tions was at odds with the reac­tions of the audience.

This, to use pro-wrestling par­lance, was a moment of break­ing kay­fabe: when the nar­ra­tive pushed by the WWE, and the way audi­ences respond to it, are at odds with one anoth­er. The most obvi­ous instance of this was the inaus­pi­cious return of Hulk Hogan to Raw. Hogan insist­ed that the audi­ence was the great­est tag team part­ner he’d had dur­ing his sto­ried career (even if their audi­ble boos didn’t agree with him), but the main pur­pose of his cameo seemed to be noth­ing more than prod­uct place­ment, a post-cred­it stinger telling you what to buy next: shrug­ging off a hos­tile crowd, Hulk Hogan talked up the part­ner­ship between WWE and his beer brand.

Through­out the debut of the Net­flix Era, the stream­er seemed to loom large over pro­ceed­ings; com­men­ta­tors Michael Cole and Pat McAfee put a con­stant empha­sis on the fact that this was ​“Raw on Net­flix.” And more than that, the broad­cast couldn’t help but point the cam­era towards actors and come­di­ans in the crowd who had projects in the pipeline with Net­flix; even Ted Saran­dos, the company’s CEO, was giv­en a shoutout by The Rock. The lat­ter is some­thing that feels strange because, for all intents and pur­pos­es, The Rock and Dwayne John­son are not the same per­son; the for­mer is a per­sona, a con­struc­tion of Kay­fabe. The Rock would nev­er cham­pi­on some­thing for its ​“very long shelf life across mul­ti­ple ver­ti­cals” even if Dwayne John­son would. See­ing The Rock give shout-outs to Ted Saran­dos and Bela Bajaria (the CEO and Chief Con­tent Offi­cer of Net­flix respec­tive­ly) makes the whole thing feel cor­po­rate and sani­tised in a way that this merg­er, in the­o­ry, was designed to avoid.

To acknowl­edge and begin a new era for the WWE and Net­flix once might be for­giv­able; after all, this doesn’t hap­pen every day, and it’s impos­si­ble to ignore what this kind of plat­form can do for pro-wrestling. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, it doesn’t end with beer brands and cor­po­rate acknowl­edge­ments. Between match­es, back­stage inter­view­er Cathy Kel­ley spoke to Gabriel Igle­sias – who was wear­ing a but­ton-up shirt embla­zoned with logos for both Net­flix and the WWE – essen­tial­ly to pro­mote a Net­flix spe­cial that debuted the day after the Raw broad­cast. Even when their inter­view was hijacked by wrestling team The New Day, Kofi Kingston still acknowl­edged his new cor­po­rate over­lords by say­ing ​“this is Raw on Net­flix, this is the biggest plat­form that this indus­try has ever seen,” and only try­ing to hum­ble Igle­sias by say­ing, bizarrely, ​“That’s why nobody’s gonna watch your special!”

The irony in all of this is that Kingston and The Rock, Michael Cole and Pat McAfee (even Gabriel Igle­sias), are all right about one thing: this is Raw on Net­flix, for bet­ter and for worse. From the begin­ning of the new Era it’s becom­ing clear that this new plat­form doesn’t exist with­out com­pro­mis­es, whether that’s in the incred­i­bly vis­i­ble glad-hand­ing with cor­po­rate CEOs, to the aggres­sive attempts to let WWE syn­er­gise with oth­er Net­flix pro­duc­tions. If this broad­cast – which had major fights with the poten­tial to shake-up sto­ry­telling and the sta­tus quo with­in the WWE – felt like the end of a block­buster fran­chise, it was also the instal­ment that pro­pels these beloved heroes and vil­lains into a vast, shared universe.

Less than a week after the first episode aired live, the orig­i­nal stream was edit­ed for both dura­tion and con­tent, cut­ting the orig­i­nal broad­cast from over three hours to under two and a half, as well as cen­sor­ing pro­fan­i­ties from the orig­i­nal live show. While this might seem like a small ges­ture, it mean­ing­ful­ly de-fangs some of what made the orig­i­nal broad­cast – and the idea of the WWE com­ing to Net­flix in the first place – com­pelling. The Rock’s off­hand pro­fan­i­ty – acknowl­edg­ing that the audi­ence like­ly think his enthu­si­asm for Net­flix is ​“bull­shit” – being cen­sored does make this new era for the WWE feel cor­po­rate, pos­si­bly even PG. Now the loom­ing con­cern for WWE is whether it can sur­vive becom­ing yet anoth­er piece of anony­mous, syn­er­gis­tic, cor­po­rate content.