Who has the best pay-per-view formula? | Opinion
Whose pay-per-view game is best? The answer may surprise you.
There’s been a lot of talk lately about what makes a great pay-per-view. Many want top quality matches, some want a strong production experience, and others just want to go to bed at a decent hour. For this week’s article, let’s go over each major promotion and share the pros and cons of each’s big wrestling events. Feel free to yell at me if you disagree, but after watching enough big shows over the course of almost 30 years, I think I am an expert in the field.
WWE’s shows go by pretty quickly. They run around three hours now, maybe a little more for the bigger shows like WrestleMania. That’s a positive on their end as their events end relatively early, which is nice compared to AEW. But match quality can be hit and miss, often because of the booking, which is inexcusable given the talent WWE has on their roster. The shows recently have also been plagued with commercials and ads to the point of parody. The first night of WrestleMania this year was the most glaring culprit, a show that ended on such a sour note I openly wondered if the future of wrestling was just one big giant ad.
AEW’s shows mostly focus on wrestling and the match quality is extremely high, more so than any other promotion. Each of AEW’s shows this year have been tremendous, and one of them is very likely to win show of the year in next year’s Wrestling Observer Awards. But if you read this website, you know AEW’s main problem with their pay-per-views: they’re just way too long. The company asks you to commit five to six hours of your day, and that’s not including the pre-show or the post-show media scrum, which adds 2-3 more hours to the mix. The sickos may be perfectly fine spending that much time watching their favorite promotion, but not everyone has, or even wants, to spend that amount of time watching wrestling. And if you’re a promoter, you want your shows to be accessible to everyone, not just a core set of die-hard fans.
I’ve tried to watch as much CMLL as I can over the last year or so, and they may be the easiest show to watch. I don’t know everyone, but the matches run at a quick pace, the outfits are fun and colorful, and Arena Mexico always feels hot. The top matches I’ve seen are usually great as well. Most weeks the shows only go a little over two hours, so that’s a feather in their cap as well. But their streaming price is high, setting up a barrier to bigger success when there’s already enough good wrestling out there.
There’s also TNA which keeps their shows at a decent pace and, for the most part, have decent matches. But only being decent in the year 2026, is a death knell for any promotion looking to break out of the pack. There’s talent there, but the booking is extremely hit and miss and more often than not, TNA seems to shoot themselves in the foot whenever the attention is turned to them.
So who is best?
When it comes to the perfect pay-per-view structure, New Japan beats every promotion listed above. I’ve watched many big New Japan events that go five hours but they’re a breeze to watch simply because of how they are laid out. The undercard moves at a quick pace and time is given to the top matches, which are usually strong if not great. That doesn’t mean to say New Japan has the best cards – they have struggled in the last few years booking-wise and I question Gedo as a booker a lot more than I used to. But in terms of layout and pacing, that’s something all companies should try to emulate.
If you take NJPW’s pacing with WWE’s show length and AEW’s match quality, you would have one of the best promotions of all time in professional wrestling. Each promotion can learn something from one another. It’s not necessarily about how long a show runs or how many matches there are on the card, it’s about making sure you have a show that captures people’s interest. If you want to run a five hour show, book it in a way that doesn’t tire people out.
Bryan Rose is an editor from California that has been covering professional wrestling for well over a decade. He officially joined F4WOnline as an editor in 2017.