WWE ThunderDome

» see wwethunderdome.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Anyone who worked through 2020 learned the shape of a grid of video tiles, each one a face in a different room, all of them slightly out of sync. WWE looked at that grid and decided it was an audience. The ThunderDome was nearly a thousand LED boards stacked in rows around a wrestling ring, and the people on them had joined by video call from home.

The problem it solved was real. When the pandemic closed arenas in mid-March 2020, WWE moved Raw and SmackDown into its own Performance Center training facility in Orlando and taped them in front of nobody. By late May the company was using its own trainees as a crowd, and by mid-June it had added the wrestlers' friends and family. None of it looked like wrestling, which is a form built on a room full of people reacting in unison.

WWE announced the ThunderDome on 17 August 2020 and debuted it four days later on SmackDown, with SummerSlam following on 23 August. Attending was free. You reserved a virtual seat days ahead, logged in at an allocated call time, and appeared live on a board somewhere in the building for the length of the show. The arena mix was blended with the virtual crowd's own chants into what WWE's Duncan Leslie called a virtual audience mix, so the noise in the broadcast was partly the noise the remote fans were actually making.

It never stopped moving. The first residency was at the Amway Center in Orlando, from 21 August to 7 December 2020, which ended because the NBA and ECHL seasons wanted their building back. The set was rebuilt at Tropicana Field in St. Petersburg from 11 December, until the Tampa Bay Rays wanted theirs. The last stop was the Yuengling Center on the University of South Florida campus in Tampa, from 12 April 2021. Three arenas in eleven months, all of them in Florida, each one borrowed until its real tenant came home.

~ the record ~

~ nearly a thousand screens ~

The strange result of having no live crowd was that the production got better. With the building empty of paying customers, WWE could put drones and lasers into the entrances, run pyro and projections at a level it had previously saved for pay-per-views, and do it every week. Kevin Dunn, the company's executive vice president of television production, said flatly that they were able to do things production-wise that they could never otherwise do.

Awards followed, which is unusual for a stopgap. The ThunderDome took the Virtual Fan Experience category at the 2020 SPORTEL Awards, and Best Tech Innovation During the COVID-19 Pandemic at the 2021 Cynopsis Sports Media Awards. WWE's developmental brand got its own version on 4 October 2020, the Capitol Wrestling Center, built inside the Performance Center with the same boards plus a small live crowd in masks behind plexiglass walls.

~ moderating a crowd ~

Here is the part nobody had to think about before. If the audience is user-supplied video, the audience becomes content you are publishing, and you have to police it. WWE wrote rules for its own crowd: no offensive material held up to the camera, and no merchandise from rival promotions. Anyone breaking them was cut from the livestream and banned from future shows.

The rules existed because they were needed almost immediately. On 25 August 2020, four days into the ThunderDome's life, somebody got an image of a KKK rally onto the boards during a match, and the New York Post wrote it up the same day. A free seat with a webcam turned out to be a broadcast slot, and a few thousand of them handed out weekly turned out to need the same moderation as a comments section.

~ the day it died ~

People wanted in. There were over 130,000 requests for a virtual seat in the first three months and over 650,000 by March 2021, against roughly 1,000 seats a show, a figure Stephanie McMahon confirmed in November 2020 along with the claim that ratings had risen since the move out of the Performance Center.

The end had been on the calendar for weeks, and it comes with three defensible dates. The last show produced inside the ThunderDome was SmackDown on 9 July 2021. The final Raw taped there aired on 12 July, which is the date Wikipedia's infobox records as the closure. The last ThunderDome broadcast of any kind aired on 15 July, which is the date this grave uses, because it is the last day anybody watching at home saw the thing working. Live touring resumed the next night with SmackDown in Houston, and Money in the Bank on 18 July in Fort Worth was the first WWE event in sixteen months with a full house and no restrictions.

The boards came down, the Yuengling Center went back to college basketball, and wwethunderdome.com now redirects to WWE.com.

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