WWE premium live events have become much more succinct as of late.
Whereas AEW loads up five-to-seven hour marathon shows when their pay-per-views roll around, WWE has gradually transitioned into shorter-length special events, often featuring four or five top matches and nothing else.
During a recent discussion with the Wrestle Rant podcast, Aleister Black addressed the shorter WWE premium live events, and why he thinks it is a good idea.
“Yeah, I think having less matches on PLEs, especially because they’re a lot more frequent, makes a lot more sense,” Black said. “Even back when I worked in Japan a lot, that was kind of like the given, five, six matches a night, because it keeps everything a lot more special. The second you go above, in my personal opinion, above the level of seven or eight matches, you’re going to wear out the crowd a lot. We live in an age where attention spans are very limited. Everything is a lot of gratification. So the longer you let something go for the sake of having people on the card, because you want to put people on the card, per se, that might be at the detriment of the product with the perceived experience by fans, and I’m not saying that it’s a bad thing, because there will always be people that are absolutely enjoying it from start to finish. But I think that I can say that having match cards that are excessively big will eventually work in the detriment of the, like I said, perceived experience itself. I think that WWE made a right call with limiting the matches a little bit because, again, like I said, it makes it easier to digest, gives you more time to divide your attention on the things that you want to pay attention to in terms of storytelling, and match quality.”
Black continued, “You know, even back then, like, yeah, there were moments where there were nine matches on a card, for instance, and, yeah, some people would get three minutes because time is short and we only have X amount of spots and stuff like that, where, yeah, I mean, you can make a case that it’d be harder to be on a PLE, but at the same time, the frequency of the PLEs has also increased. So I would say it evens itself out a little bit, but I definitely think that that is… in my personal opinion, always been the way forward where less is more.”
WWE returns to the premium live event arena this coming weekend, as WWE Survivor Series: WarGames emanates from Petco Park in San Diego, CA. on Saturday, November 29, 2025.
Make sure to join us here at WrestlingHeadlines.com on 11/29 for live WWE Survivor Series: WarGames results coverage.
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(H/T to Corey Brennan and Fightful.com for transcribing the above quotes.)
