Bruce Prichard on the length of wrestling shows: “Ten matches on a card is hard to watch – I think less is more”
While speaking on his Something to Wrestle podcast, WWE executive director Bruce Prichard commented on WWE’s decision to produce shorter PLEs…
“Well, I think it’s a bit of a more modern thing, but also when you look at it, I go back and watch sometimes—ten matches on a card is hard to watch. And when you look at presentation and you put so many things in a ten-match card, at the end of the night, what do you remember?
You’re most likely going to remember the main event and the last match you saw. But there may have been a big angle in the third match and a hell of a match that you’ve forgotten because you’ve seen so much other good, bad, and indifferent. So I think less is more.
But sometimes, yeah, you have to battle that demon of, ‘Oh my God, we need to get more people on this. We’ve got to get more people on—it’s WrestleMania.’ The PLE, the streaming aspect of the business, has changed that dynamic completely because talent isn’t paid on pay-per-view buys. There are no pay-per-view buys. There’s no time allotment. You can give them an hour, you can give them five hours—whatever. They don’t really want more than three.
It’s just a different time. It’s a different way that people consume. So those, you know, ‘God, I need my WrestleMania moment.’ Wait a minute, man. You’re going to have a moment next month, and you’re going to be in the main event.
‘Yeah, but I want to be on WrestleMania.’ Okay—where? Because it’s going to get lost here, and we can’t do this here because we’re doing this at Mania.
There’s just a lot more territory, man. A lot more avenues. And plus, by the way, you’re doing television every single week—five hours of TV every week. That’s a lot of television. And television is just as valuable as the PLEs now with rights fees and what have you.
So to be on television in front of a huge number of people versus a PLE—and again, that has changed too—it’s just that every time you’re on screen is valuable. It’s all valuable.”