With WrestleMania 41 in the books, wrestling fans and analysts are beginning to give their thoughts on the event, its matches, its storylines, and its aftermath. One of the overarching conversation topics was the controversial finish to the WWE Undisputed Championship match that saw John Cena win his 17th world championship by defeating Cody Rhodes, without the help of The Rock, who did not appear at the event, causing an uproar online and causing fans to ask for clarity on his lack of involvement.
One of the other larger conversations was around the energy levels between Night 1 and Night 2, as the crowd seemed to react more excitedly during Night 2 than during Night 1, save for the main event match that saw Paul Heyman turn on both Roman Reigns and CM Punk and assist Seth Rollins with the win. During the post-show press conference, Screen Rant asked WWE Chief Creative Officer Paul “Triple H” Levesque to comment on both the energy levels between the nights and how this energy affects the booking of the cards.
Triple H Says It’s a Difficult Process to Build Two Nights of WrestleMania
The Booking and Buil Are Influence by the Length of the Event
While the build-up to WrestleMania 41 was filled with creative highs and lows, the match cards seemed to hit their stride just a week or two out from the event itself. However, during the show, a clear disparity between the nights could be perceived, with the crowd’s energy levels responding much favorably to Night 2 than to Night 1.
When asked by Screen Rant about the process of booking the cards for each night based on crowd feedback, WWE Chief Creative Officer Paul “Triple H” Levesque said that they focus heavily on making sure it’s a balanced approach and urged fans to look at the larger picture.
To that point, it’s a very tricky build and balance over two days. Doing this for two days is different than just doing one day and just going in there, guns blazing and just fire all your guns and just go, right? That’s different. You got to fire a lot of guns, but you got to get to a place where night two… You have to get to a place where people are excited to come to night two, and night two actually surpasses a little bit night one. I don’t want that to sound like we’re taking our foot off the gas on anything on night one, but it is a challenging build, and I think that you have to build that properly so that by the time you get to the end of night two, because it’s not just night one fatigue, it’s night two fatigue. That carries over – a lot of people here for both shows. So it’s a tricky build. We put a lot, lot, lot of thought, we all do, into what is the right cadence. And as I mentioned last night, you have to have stuff for tomorrow, and you have to have stuff for Friday.
You cannot just get to the end of the two-night WrestleMania and be like, ‘Wow, they shot off every nuke they possibly could have. That was unbelievable, and now they’ve got nothing,’ right? It all has to work together. It’s easy to look at it in the minute or have that singular focus and say things about stuff, but you have to look at it as a whole. At least that’s how we do. I thought we did a great job of having it build from one night to the next and carry on through. But always – there’s a funny thing sometimes when you talk to people about it and they think they’re saying things, or they’re criticizing things that we don’t know. There is nobody harder on us than us, promise you. Nobody harder on us. So we look at every single thing we do. It’s never perfect. It’s never exactly what you want it to be. And there’s always… I keep notes while the show is going on, and I’m writing things on the bottom of run sheets and across the back, and it’s all stuff that I’ll transfer tomorrow so that there’s a running tab of what we want to do differently, what we want to do better, and how.
It’s just always got to be that way, and it’ll always be that way. We’re never going to be satisfied because we always want more. The truth is, we always want more, and this will sound cliché, but we want it for you. We’re trying to put on the ultimate spectacle that we can across all things and lasting into the future. We’re harder on ourselves than anyone.
Triple H, the head of WWE Creative since 2022, has received praise overall for his creative processes and storylines, a clear directive change from the way Vince McMahon booked his creative when in control of the book. Recent changes in creative direction have led fans to speculate that Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson may have more input on creative than anticipated, further amplified by his comments on “The Pat McAfee Show” as he responded to criticism of Night 2’s main event and, most notably, his absence.
Creative Approach Doesn’t Always Make Everything Perfect
Creative approach, in any medium, is a tricky thing as you work to balance both fan expectations and talent relations, and the process of doing so is generally imperfect and will, from a general perspective, leave someone unhappy or feeling offput by a decision that doesn’t appear to make too much sense in the immediate form. WrestleMania 41 is no exception to this process, and the event had some fantastic creative moments and surprises, while others may have been better off being fleshed out more in the lead-up or perhaps paid off on Monday Night Raw or Friday Night SmackDown.
Triple H, working to serve both sides of his world, will ultimately make creative decisions to move the needle forward in their stories, for good or for bad, and the crowd will respond to these decisions based on the approach. Fans may not always be happy with the approach, or question choices, like the removal of Bayley from the women’s tag team championship match and replacing her with Becky Lynch, or leaving Chelsea Green, one of the most popular Superstars in recent memory, off the card completely.
In this day and age, fans will certainly provide the responses on how they feel about a decision loudly and boisteriously, whether it’s the live crowd booing the elimination of Karrion Kross from the Andre The Giant Battle Royal, or Dave LaGreca of SiriusXM’s “Busted Open” giving a loud and unapologetic critique of the main event’s missing elements. However, Triple H seems at least willing to address some of the criticism he receives, which is already a big step forward compared to the previous WWE management.
