Select Answers EXCLUSIVE: How Watch Parties Got Approved For Mania (Patreon)

Welcome to Select Answers, a feature that provides some of the answers to questions that were posed to Sean Ross Sapp by our subscribers.

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What happened with the WWE PLE watch parties? Why did some people doubt that they got canceled?

I'm not sure why a bunch of twitter trolls pretended they were still active when they weren't, but that's par for the course for them. I saw some post outdated watch party locations before the blackout was lifted, and others lied and claimed they called Joe Hand Promotions before deleting their twitters when pressed on it.

Here's the long and short of it. Blackouts used to be way more common in sports, and WWE/TKO was looking to implement that line of thinking to increase ticket sales for their events. There was a Rikishi-led watch party in the Chicago area for Elimination Chamber that got canceled as a result of the blackout. A number of venues in the Las Vegas area, as well as talent reps were contacted and told public watch parties were not going to be permitted within 50 miles of the event.

WWE and TKO wanted people to show up to the venue and watch WrestleMania instead of one of the various watch parties. Even Circa Las Vegas Stadium Swim was among those contacted, which they confirmed on social media. WWE and Joe Hand Promotions were in contact with the venues and agents, who heavily pushed for the blackout to be lifted. A lot of wrestlers get appearance fees to host watch parties as well. Fortunately, about a month before the event, it was lifted. Had these locations disobeyed, they would have been subject to legal action.

Numerous sources tied to the decision told us that the The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority also pushed for the blackout to be lifted. Their reasoning was that the site fees they secured to bring WWE to Las Vegas again for WrestleMania was supposed to benefit the city as a whole, not just Allegiant Stadium and WWE. In all, everything worked out ok.