WWE WrestleMania 28: PPV Buyrate Expected To Obliterate WWE's Previous Record

The WWE pulled out all the stops for WrestleMania 28.

Vince McMahon and company announced the huge main event of The Rock vs. John Cena a year in advance, brought back Shawn Michaels to be the special guest referee of a Hell in a Cell match between Undertaker and Triple H, and even had Chris Jericho return for a fantastic match with CM Punk. 

As you could tell by the stacked WrestleMania card, the WWE was banking on it being one of the, if not the, biggest and best WrestleManias ever. And guess what? It apparently worked. 

From SEScoops.com:  

"

Early numbers for the WrestleMania 28 buyrate are coming in and preliminary estimates are showing that this year’s event could be the most-bought pay-per-view in WWE history. With one year to build up the blockbuster dream match between The Rock and John Cena, WWE was looking to surpass the annual benchmark of 1 million buys and had its sights on the record-holding WrestleMania 26 buyrate of approximately 1.25 million buys.

According to ESPN’s Gus Ramsey, WWE looks like they might shatter that record. Ramsey tweeted the following on Wednesday:

“… Rock and Brock each sign 1 year deals. WM28 did 1.9M buys. WWE was targeting 1.5M”  

"

Holy. Crap. 

While I do want to stress that this is the early buyrate and hasn’t been confirmed by WWE, this is absolutely insane if it’s true. 

A million buys would have been great, and breaking WrestleMania 26’s record buyrate would have been awesome. But 1.9 million buys? That’s almost unbelievable. 

Although I wouldn’t be surprised if WrestleMania 28 actually earned fewer buys than that, anything above 1.5 million is borderline ridiculous. It just goes to show you that putting on a good card will make people want to buy a pay-per-view. 

The Rock undoubtedly played a huge part in this colossal buyrate, but so did Cena, Punk, Triple H, Undertaker, Jericho and even all of the guys in the undercard matches. It was a team effort from the WWE, and these guys really delivered at WrestleMania 28. 

Assuming this is true, there’s no doubt that Vince McMahon is smiling from ear to ear right now and realizing that bringing in major stars from the past will certainly pay off. Of course, you might also be able to contribute the huge buyrate to building up the main event for more than a year or to speculation that Batista and/or Brock Lesnar were going to return as well. 

Whatever the situation may be, this is phenomenal news for the WWE and a good sign that we’ll see extended feuds and more big names in the future.

Note: As part of the new WWE blog, I'll be asking all of the B/R wrestling readers for questions for a new mailbag that I will post on Fridays. It will be a slideshow featuring 10-20 questions and answers on a wide range of topics. You can submit questions either through Formspring or Twitter, and the best ones will be answered in the B/R mailbag.