As is required by the notoriously stringent Louisiana Athletic Commission, WrestleMania XXXIV was lit AF. But was it WrestleMania X-Seven or just WrestleMania X-8? Read ahead and find out for yourself… what I think.
Like, you need to decide that shit for yourself, I’m just trying to be a useful guide on your journey to WrestleVana.
These reviews were once called “Bang for Your Buck,” but because of the Network, the value of an individual show is less based on “getting your money’s worth” than “how much does having access to something like this make me want to renew my subscription?”
Which means that in addition to taking into account things like major character shifts, definitive conclusions (which are different from clean finishes) and spots that don’t make their way to Raw or Smackdown Live, it’ll also focus on “how many times would I rewatch this”, “would I show this to non-fans as a reason why wrestling is worth watching” and “how different was this historically?”
Each match is rated on a sliding scale between +1 and -1 with +1 being “Constantly show the match to non-wrestling fans as the first free hit of a drug,” and things that make you reevaluate being a fan — literally stop watching because you are so upset by the result — earning up to a -1 score.
I’ll be using what I said from the Fantasy Booking WrestleMania XXXIV preview to see how close I was to predicting what would happen and whether or not it lived up to my pre-established expectations. You know, like an adult.
As always, while I will review the matches on the pre-show for merit — and try to frame it under the same criteria mentioned above — I don’t “score” them, because one can get these matches for free regardless of subscriptions and I’d watch paint dry in a wrestling ring if I didn’t have to pay for it, so it doesn’t seem fair to judge it that way.