Royal Rumble

The Royal Rumble is a professional wrestling pay-per-view event, produced every January by professional wrestling promotion WWE. The event is named after the Royal Rumble match, a Battle royal match whose participants enter at timed intervals.

With the exception of the initial Royal Rumble event in 1988, which was shown as a television special on USA Network, the Royal Rumble has been shown on pay-per-view (first in 1989) and is one of WWE's "Big Four", along with WrestleMania, SummerSlam, and Survivor Series. The Royal Rumble is considered one of WWE's most popular pay-per-view events.

History

Event

The Royal Rumble is a pay-per-view consisting of the Royal Rumble match, championship matches, and various other matches. The first Royal Rumble took place on January 24, 1988 and was broadcast live on the USA Network. The following year, the event started to be broadcast on pay-per-view and thus became one of WWE's "big four" pay-per-views, along with WrestleMania, Survivor Series, and SummerSlam.

Royal Rumble (2015)

Royal Rumble (2015) was a professional wrestling pay-per-view (PPV) event produced by WWE. It took place on January 25, 2015 at the Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It was the twenty-eighth annual Royal Rumble event and the first to air on the WWE Network.

Like the previous year's event, the 2015 Royal Rumble is notable for the extremely negative audience reaction to the main Royal Rumble match, which was won by Roman Reigns. WWE was heavily criticized for failing to please fans for the second Royal Rumble event in a row. However, the WWE World Heavyweight Championship triple threat match between Brock Lesnar, John Cena and Seth Rollins received widespread acclaim from fans and critics alike.

The event received 145,000 buys (excluding WWE Network views), down from the previous year's 467,000 buys.

Background

Royal Rumble featured professional wrestling matches that involved wrestlers from pre-existing scripted feuds or storylines that played out on WWE television. Wrestlers portrayed heroes or villains as they followed a series of events that built tension and culminated in a wrestling match or series of matches.

Battle royal

Battle royal (plural battles royal) traditionally refers to a fight involving three or more combatants that is fought until only one fighter remains standing. In recent times, the term has been used in a more general sense to refer to any fight involving large numbers of people who are not organized into factions. Within combat sports, the term has a specific meaning, depending on the sports being discussed.

Professional wrestling

In professional wrestling, the battle royal is a match involving anywhere between four and 60 wrestlers that takes place entirely inside the ring — a wrestler is eliminated when a wrestler scores a pinfall or knocks out his or her opponent(s) (but rarely submissions). Some promotions allow over the top rope eliminations (notably the WWE as part of their annual Royal Rumble). Battle Royals are often used to determine the top contender for a championship, or filling vacant championships.

World Championship Wrestling was known for having the largest battle royal in wrestling, held annually at their WCW World War 3 pay-per-view events. The three-ring, sixty-wrestler events consisted of all sixty wrestlers parading out to the ring (usually sans formal introductions to save time) and beginning to fight at the bell. Once the number of wrestlers in each ring had dwindled down to a number suitable for a single ring, the wrestlers would all move to the designated "Ring #1" out of the three and would fight to a winner. The winners of the four World War 3 battles royal were Randy Savage, The Giant, Scott Hall, and Kevin Nash.

Royal

Royal may refer to:

Places

United States

Elsewhere

Schools

Companies

WWE

World Wrestling Entertainment, Inc. (d/b/a WWE) is an American publicly traded, privately controlled entertainment company that deals primarily in professional wrestling, with major revenue sources also coming from film, music, product licensing and direct product sales. WWE also refers to the professional wrestling promotion itself, founded by Jess McMahon and Toots Mondt in 1952 as Capitol Wrestling Corporation. As of 2014, it is the largest wrestling promotion in the world, holding over 300 events a year, and broadcasting to about 36 million viewers in more than 150 countries. The company's headquarters are located in Stamford, Connecticut, with offices in major cities across the world.

As in other professional wrestling promotions, WWE shows are not legitimate contests, but purely entertainment-based, featuring storyline-driven, scripted, and choreographed matches, though they often include moves that can put performers at risk of injury if not performed correctly. This was first publicly acknowledged by WWE's owner Vince McMahon in 1989 to avoid taxes from athletic commissions. Since the 1980s, WWE publicly branded their product as sports entertainment, which is considered to acknowledge the product's roots in competitive sport and dramatic theater.