Why WWE’s Celebrity Obsession Backfired
- Thomas Hall
- 2 days ago
- 5 min read
Like any other form of entertainment, professional wrestling has certain tropes which keep coming up over and over. Some of these are done for years because they are ideas that tend to work very well. You can see them over and over with mostly positive results.
However, as is the case with anything else, there comes a point where the law of diminishing returns comes into play. Unfortunately WWE seems to be doing that again, and it is in a way that isn’t so popular.
Celebrities Have Always Been Part Of Wrestling
One of the recurring tropes that you have seen over the years in WWE is the use of celebrities. This has been a thing in wrestling for decades, with names like Muhammad Ali appearing back in the 70s (and others before him) and moving on into the WrestleMania Era. The first WrestleMania included a variety of celebrities (including Ali again) who served in a variety of roles, including ring announcer, guest referee and just showing up to wave at the fans.
Celebrities have become a regular element of WrestleMania over the years, with pretty much every edition of the show having some kind of celebrity involvement. This might have been just having them stand in the crowd, but they were certainly there in one way or another. Heck there are now official hosts for major WWE events, who tend to serve a grand total of no purpose but they are absolutely there one way or another because... yeah I don’t get it either.
WrestleMania 42 Took Things Way Too Far
Flash forward to today’s wrestling world and you can see a variety of celebrities popping up on WWE programming. That’s not something new, but the problem here is the frequency with which they are showing up. In the build to WrestleMania, you had names like Lil Yachty (more on him later), Jelly Roll, IShowSpeed and Pat McAfee. All of these people were involved in some match at WrestleMania XLII, with Roll and McAfee being in the same match. This is where things get problematic and that pesky law of diminishing returns starts to come into play.
In this year’s case, Roll and McAfee were major factors in the main event of the first night of WrestleMania for the WWE Championship. McAfee was such a huge factor that he basically took over the whole storyline and match. Roll was attacked to make Randy Orton look like more of a villain and then returned at WrestleMania to take out McAfee during the main event. That’s a bit bigger of a role for celebrities to fill than Liberace and the Rockettes showing up to dance before the main event of the original WrestleMania.
Believe it or not, this wasn’t the most well received situation, as the amount of celebrities involved in the build towards WrestleMania XLII dragged the show down. There was so much focus on the celebrities that it was dragging down the rest of the show. IShowSpeed was around time after time in the build to his six man tag, Roll wrestled a match on SmackDown a few weeks before WrestleMania (and he won clean) and McAfee was... well that was a different mess altogether.
Pat McAfee Became The Breaking Point
McAfee’s inclusion in the story was such a mess that it caused an incredible backlash. As we talked about a few weeks ago, the fans basically rebelled against WWE over how annoyed they were at the whole thing. It wound up working, which is why you haven’t seem McAfee since WrestleMania and probably won’t be seeing him again. At the same time, Roll hasn’t been around and while he might be again, there is a good chance he won’t be around for a long while. That’s because the way things were being done wasn’t working for the fans or the celebrities involved.
In short, the idea of celebrities in wrestling is a good concept, but it has to be done in the right way. If celebrities become the focus of the stories they are involved in, the whole thing stops being so interesting. At the end of the day, most celebrities aren’t there because of what they can do in the ring but rather for the sake of drawing in some attention to the show. I’m not entirely sure how many extra eyes Roll was going to bring to the show, but I don’t quite thing it was worth the annoyances that it caused the regular fans to have.
Lil Yachty Shows How Celebrity Involvement Should Work
Now, at the same time, there is absolutely a use for celebrities in wrestling and that is why we are going back to Yachty. In recent weeks, if not months now, new US Champion Trick Williams has teamed up with Yachty, who has basically become Williams’ hype man and still regularly appears with him after WrestleMania is long over. For some reason, this has been different and that is not hard to figure out.
The trick (pun intended) to Yachty and Williams is clear: Yachty isn’t the focus. Outside of rapping about Kit Wilson on SmackDown, Yachty has been little more than a traditional manager. He interferes in Williams’ matches and hypes him up, but that’s about it. We haven’t heard some long promo from Yachty. He hasn’t had a match of his own (or of any kind). There hasn’t been some big feature on him. Instead, he’s there to support Williams and that’s about it.
And that’s why it works. Yachty is a supplement to Williams, who is being treated as the big star. He’s little more than someone there to put the focus on the big star using his own natural charisma and occasional rapping talents. In other words, he’s just kind of in the background most of the time and helps out where he can. Lo and behold, that’s a huge improvement over what we’ve been seeing with the other celebrities. It’s almost like this isn’t complicated.
I have no idea if Yachty can wrestle a coherent match or if he has any kind of athleticism. Roll can brawl well enough and IShowSpeed is in incredible shape. McAfee could talk rather well and knew how to get fans going. That being said, outside of maybe the occasional tag match, I really don’t need to see them getting that much attention. They’re not supposed to be regular members of the roster because, in short, that’s not their job. It might be hard for TKO to fathom, but wrestling fans actually want to see wrestling rather than celebrities doing something in wrestling.
WWE Needs Balance... NOT More Celebrities!
I get the appeal of celebrities in wrestling. They can be valuable and if used the right way, can be quite the boost to a promotion (Mike Tyson and Dennis Rodman were huge in the Attitude Era because they were used in the right way). Having the same celebrities week in and week out doesn’t often work that way though, as it really just makes it seem like this is what they’re doing now. Why should I care if a singer or streamer or whatever else is on TV six weeks in a row?
WWE knows how to make this stuff work and there is a way to make it a success (again, see Lil Yachty). However, as is so often the case in wrestling, the trick is to not go too far with anything. The build to WrestleMania showed just how badly things can go with celebrities if they aren’t used in the right way and it was a big misstep. Thankfully things have toned down a bit, though it won’t matter if we’re right back here in about ten months. Use the star power in the right way, or they’re really just bringing everything else down.
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