Reviving a dead horse: Reexamining the WrestleMania III attendance debate

[shodate]

Shodate, you can't compare a gate from 1987 and 2001. A lot of inflation to account for as well as market education on the "fair" value for seeing a live event. The Observer talks about the $9 WM 3 seat sections which is a price range that would not exist in the RR 2001 setup.

even adjusted for inflation wm three if not top 5 all time drawing show that is fact gate wise

 

done calculations on that friend .do not worry modern money Wm three drew around 5 Million USD based on the calculation I have done say around 2.5 or three times that sounds Right but compare to Inoki final show new japan drew over 8 million in 1998 Adjusted inflation witch id put at around 1.5 times would come out in modern money at around 12 million USD gate

 

saying if the numbers for Mania three were not Kayfabe they would have had around 30k more fans in the Silverdome and yes done all the math 4.5 million the adjustment for inflation amount show how highly papered the show was is my point

 

I am comparing two boom times in wrestling one the biggest market one the 2nd biggest market with inflation-adjusted numbers and I giving WWE the kayfabed number [which I never believed]

 

all the math has been done

[soup23]

Inflation math isnt the only metric to use. Again, $9 and value tickets wouldnt have been an option in your 2001 example. That is a whole different catagory of tickets so in an analytics standpoint, youre comparing uneven sources.

[shodate]

Inflation math isnt the only metric to use. Again, $9 and value tickets wouldnt have been an option in your 2001 example. That is a whole different catagory of tickets so in an analytics standpoint, youre comparing uneven sources.

 

inflation only is how judge movies in this way what of My 1998 example two big stadium shows inflation math in right and yes the egg did have budget tickets in 1998 these days not so much

[iamthedoctor]

 

 

 

If the company's internal financial reports say there were 78k fans seated in the building and the number was corroborated by multiple internal sources, it seems pretty open and shut that that's the real attendance number. No other number receives this much leeway or this much stock placed in eyeball tests of official photos.

If people are willing to believe they would inflate the number to seem more important, why wouldn't they believe that they would deflate the number to potentially save money on taxes? They weren't a public company at the time, so I could see internal financials being a little murky.

 

Does WWE really have a reputation of doing something like that at any point in their history? When 32's attendance came out as 80k, no one seemed to think they might be fudging the taxes even though the official pictures don't make it look like anything near 1/5 of the arena is empty. If the main crux of the argument is that the arena "looks" at or near capacity in official photos and camerework, then that is some pretty poor evidence considering it's pretty much the job of the guys taking those pics to make the attendance seem as impressive as possible. There's no way they'd make it easy to see the empty seats scattered around the top level.

 

 

32 came when the company was publicly traded and they weren't going to play games like that.

 

Wrestling has a long, long, LONG history that probably continues to this day of promoters claiming smaller houses than they actually drew when it came time to decide payroll or pay taxes.

 

 

Also, compare and contrast this (also professional) photo of the Hoosier Dome at WM8. You can do all the camera tricks in the world, there are clearly more empty seats in the upper balcony and on the floor than there are at Mania 3.

 

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2014/08/22/sports/Y-JP-MACUR/Y-JP-MACUR-master1050.jpg

 

Here's the 1994 World Cup also at the Silverdome, also with a pro photographer at virtually the same angle, also with visible swathes of empty seats.

 

 

Question is all the other Wrestlemania attandance numbers are they legit?

[PeteF3]

Pretty much no public attendance numbers for any event of any kind are legit. Though you can figure legit numbers from the WWE's SEC filings.

[CarpetCrawler]

Super unrelated but I felt like this was a good thread to share it in. a dude on Reddit posted pictures he took at Wrestlemania 3 and they're pretty damn cool:

 

https://imgur.com/gallery/eUre9

[TravJ1979]

Don't know if this means anything, but on the "True story of WrestleMania," there is a pre recorded interview with Gorilla and Lord Hayes while the arena was still nearly empty and Hayes quotes the 93,000 number. It seems they had that number before everyone entered the building.

[iamthedoctor]

Don't know if this means anything, but on the "True story of WrestleMania," there is a pre recorded interview with Gorilla and Lord Hayes while the arena was still nearly empty and Hayes quotes the 93,000 number. It seems they had that number before everyone entered the building.

 

If the capacity was to hold that many fans I could see nothing wrong with Alfred mentioning how many seats there are.