Gladiator II and its healthy box office receipts have taught us two things. First, Paul Mescal is now huge. Like, physically. It’s nuts. And, second, despite the film’s gladiatorial combat being set nearly 2,000 years ago, audiences still flock to the spectacle of muscle-bound men (and women) knocking seven bells out of each other.
Outside Hollywood, one of the biggest outfits to capitalise on our craving for this ancient sense of adventure is World Wrestling Entertainment, aka WWE, some of whose stars, Hulk Hogan and Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson among them, have become household names. Its brand of wrestling is pure show business, its fighters’ tightly choreographed moves furthering an all-important plot that plays out from week to week at arenas across the United States and, increasingly, around the world.
This is big business. WWE’s popularity has helped to make Johnson and his fellow wrestler John Cena among the highest-paid actors in Hollywood; in the ring, the likes of Paul “Triple H” Levesque, Trish Stratus and Mark “the Undertaker” Calaway have become legends among the fans who flock to the live shows or tune in to watch them on television, drawn by the drama at the heart of what the companies behind it refer to as sports entertainment.
With its imminent multibillion-dollar move to Netflix, WWE – which claims to already have 1.2 billion fans in 180 countries – looks set to keep growing.
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WWE Live!, the recent sold-out show at 3Arena in Dublin, gives a sense of its appeal. As fans queue outside, a line of bouncing children, cocky teenagers and dutiful parents snakes around Point Square. Street sellers are out in force with light-up swords.
Sam Fitzgerald, who is nine, has travelled from Cork with his family. “I like the way that people are always throwing it around and flexing and stuff,” he says.
“Tell him how many wrestling figures you have at home,” his father, Brian, chimes in.
“I have about 73,” Sam says with pride.
His six-year-old sister, Lucy, is just as much of a devotee. According to their father, they’ve been huge fans since they were about five, much as he was growing up – “old school”, as he calls it, brandishing a wrestling T-shirt of his own. (”This is probably the last year [Sam] will get out of it,” Brian adds. “It’s more soccer with him now.”)
Nostalgia is a powerful draw. Eight-year-old James Lawless is also on his way in with his father, who is just as excited.
“It brings back the memories,” James snr says. “I’m a fan from back in the Hogan days,” in the 1980s.
His son is a huge fan of Cody Rhodes, one of tonight’s stars. What does the wrestler mean to him?
“Everything,” James jnr says shyly.
When the show starts it’s easy to see the attraction of WWE. One moment there’s some overacted brawling with wooden sticks, fold-up chairs and a table that, unsurprisingly, doesn’t stay intact for too long; the next, performers are reaching into the crowd and hugging children who have come along dressed in mini versions of their costumes.
It’s an eclectic mix of faux rage thrown around the ring and genuine connection with fans – something perhaps not hard to generate amid the collective effervescence of the 10,000 or so devotees who make up the crowd.
What’s been an interesting trend has been ‘reality’ television, where it’s not quite clear where the boundaries are. You’ll often hear WWE described as performance theatre. This is caricatured, curated, and that’s okay. You classify it in your mind, [and] that allows you to enjoy it very much in the world of fiction
— John Francis Leader
The audience are anything but bystanders at WWE events, cheering, booing and becoming an additional character in this live soap opera. Fans stick their fingers in the air for the fighters’ entrance songs – every wrestler has their own theme song – and invariably wear or carry WWE merchandise.
“Hit him in the head!” one boy shouts nearby. It’s not clear if the wrestler is responding specifically to his direction, but, of course, he hits him in the head.
A few rows behind is a boy whose hoodie and sunglasses both read “Yeet”, a long-memed retort that’s also the catchphrase of Jey Uso, one of the menacing hulks on stage.
Netflix sees these larger-than-life performances as an opportunity to cement its appeal as a one-stop shop for home entertainment. From January 2025 the streaming giant will air WWE’s flagship weekly show live, having agreed to pay $5 billion, or about €4.8 billion, over the next decade to screen Monday Night Raw, which is currently watched live by 1.7 million people a week.
The move will “dramatically expand the reach” of the organisation, according to Mark Shapiro, president of WWE’s parent company, TKO. TKO was created to facilitate WWE’s merger with Ultimate Fighting Championship – the Las Vegas-based mixed-martial-arts promoter owned by Endeavor, the American media company that began as a Hollywood talent agency.
The Netflix deal, which also includes streaming rights to all other WWE programming, including the fan favourites SmackDown and WrestleMania, helps confirm that Netflix has won the streaming wars over its rivals Amazon, Disney and Apple. It has found a winning formula in what Ted Sarandos, its head, calls “sports-adjacent drama” – the type of programming exemplified by Formula 1: Drive to Survive.
In the locker room, everything I see is extremely positive. A lot of changes have been made positively. I think all of the incidents that needed to be dealt with are being dealt with
— Aoife Cusack, aka Lyra Valkyria
That series’ appeal to Gen Z fans is credited with boosting the popularity of the motorsport, particularly in the US. (In another sign of the commercial draw of sports entertainment, Formula 1 is now owned by Liberty Media, which is also the largest shareholder in Live Nation Entertainment, parent company of Ticketmaster and, ultimately, of 3Arena.)
The characters in Drive to Survive are real racing drivers and team principals, of course. WWE is strictly fantasy: even though their outlandish moves can injure its wrestlers, its bouts and the equally scripted feuds surrounding them are pure entertainment – as the company has testified in the United States in order to avoid the regulations that apply to boxing and other combat sports.
It’s “extreme storytelling”, according to Aoife Cusack, aka Lyra Valkyria, who is Ireland’s latest WWE star.
The Dubliner is not at 3Arena tonight, but the 28-year-old accepts a video call from Orlando, in Florida, where she has lived for the past several years.
She started out on mats at Fight Factory, Ireland’s largest wrestling school, when it was based in Bray, Co Wicklow. I tell her about a touching moment at 3Arena when a performer beckoned over a little girl from the crowd who was holding a handmade sign and gave her a hug. “That’s honestly the whole point of what you do,” Cusack says. “It’s easy to get caught up in the ... wild lifestyle, and sometimes it takes seeing a little girl coming up to you with her poster to really draw you back out and remind you of why you do it.”
Inspired by the likes of Rebecca Quin, the Limerick WWE star better known in the ring as Becky Lynch, Cusack has worked her way to the top. Earlier this year she was called up from NXT, WWE’s development league, to star in Raw.
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WWE once relegated women to the status of sexualised sideshow. The company’s recognition of them has come far since the early 2000s, when fans voted on a babe of the year – and even since 2016, when women were referred to as divas. “Fans started this hashtag called #GiveDivasAChance,” Cusack says, “and I think that carried an awful lot of weight in actually getting women more time to showcase what they were able to do.” Now, she says, they’re an equal draw.
Fan-driven change is a theme in and out of the ring. Revelations about a toxic workplace culture and allegations of sexual assault and trafficking against WWE’s former chief executive Vince McMahon resulted in his resignation after audience backlash; a US federal investigation is under way.
Although Netflix’s Raw programming is unlikely to come with a caveat about the WWE’s scandal-ridden history, the streamer released a documentary series last September chronicling the rise of “Mr McMahon’s” wrestling empire and the fall of the man himself. McMahon, who created WWE by taking over the company that his father founded in 1953, and has strongly denied all the claims against him, ended his association with it earlier this year, selling more than $2.3 billion (€2.1 billion) of TKO stock.
[ WWE: A global success story where the villains are in plain sightOpens in new window ]
Cusack says she hasn’t witnessed a toxic culture at WWE. “I think I started at a very good time,” she says. “I think it’s very, very different now. In the locker room, everything I see is extremely positive. A lot of changes have been made positively. I think all of the incidents that needed to be dealt with are being dealt with or have been, and I don’t see any of that kind of thing in this current locker room.”
Some may find it hard to divorce elements of McMahon’s wrestling empire from watching WWE on Netflix, even if it’s a legacy that TKO would like to leave behind – especially now that Donald Trump has nominated McMahon’s wife, Linda, a former WWE chief executive, to become education secretary in his second US presidential administration. (She is also the subject of legal allegations, accused of failing to act on credible claims that a late WWE employee had sexually abused “ring boys” who worked at wrestling matches; she and her husband emphatically deny the allegations.)
Trump and Vince McMahon, who have long publicised their friendship, once toughed it out in the ring together, for the so-called Battle of the Billionaires. As victor, Trump then got to shave off McMahon’s hair in front of the crowd.
The goodies and baddies are at least universally agreed upon within the ring. “Wrestling, at its core, we’re storytellers,” Cusack says. “Everything comes down to good versus evil, so I feel like it’s such a great form of escapism and excitement. Ultimately, whether good or evil triumph, you’re going to have your favourites, and you’re going to lean on them and think about them when times get tough.”
Should it be a concern that children hold up these muscly stooges as role models? For John Francis Leader, of University College Dublin’s media and entertainment psychology lab, it’s all about balance. “I think it’s important to be conscious of your media diet and to manage it intentionally,” he says. “That is particularly important when something like this comes to Netflix.”
He believes that wrestlers can be perfectly acceptable role models for children, as long as they’re not their only ones. “How can I make sure I have 20 or 30 other representations [of masculinity] so I don’t fall into this trap of thinking, ‘Here’s what it means to be male,’ in a very narrow way?” he says. “Let me see somebody laugh and cry; somebody strong and somebody struggle. Then I think you’re safe, even if you’re consuming some fairly strong stuff.
“What’s been an interesting trend – which WWE falls into – has been ‘reality’ television, where it’s not quite clear where the boundaries are. When you look at the WWE approach, you’ll often hear it described as performance theatre,” he says. “This is caricatured, curated, and that’s okay. You classify it in your mind, [and] that allows you to enjoy it very much in the world of fiction.”
It can become problematic if a viewer regards it as real, and glamorises toxic traits displayed by some of the wrestlers.
This year the BBC revived Gladiators, the combat gameshow from the early 1990s, which, like WWE, stars caricatured heroes and villains battling it out. It’s so popular that the BBC has commissioned a spin-off children’s series, Gladiators: Epic Pranks, to give young viewers “an insight into the world of the much-loved superhumans”.
What does this resurgence of screen strongmen – and strongwomen – say about the type of content that audiences are craving?
“We live in a strange world today compared to our ancestors, and for the most part we’re not getting attacked constantly,” Francis Leader says. “We’re sat at desks, thinking about things rather than hunting or being chased. However, those biological systems are still in there, and this is the argument as to why we like things like horror movies. Things like Halloween are important traditions because they give that somewhere to go ... Certain needs, if they’re not given space in the media or other places, they need to be met sometimes in a caricatured form.”
Wrestlers’ slapstick physicality tells a story anyone can understand, with villains, scoundrels, chancers and charmers. It’s all about twists, tribalism and age-old instincts. One might hope, then, that this string of Irish success continues in the ring.
Paul “Gladiator” Mescal vs Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson, anyone?
Monday Night Raw begins on Netflix at 1am on January 6th, 2025
