WWE WrestleMania 39 News – Attendance, Live Gate, PPV Buys, More on Cody Rhodes vs. Roman Reigns Match

As noted before, WWE announced that their two-day WrestleMania 39 event this past weekend in Inglewood, California drew a combined paid attendance of 161,892 with 80,479 paid for Night 1 on April 1st and 81,395 paid for Night 2 on April 2nd.

Dave Meltzer reported in this week’s Wrestling Observer Newsletter that the real attendance numbers for WrestleMania 39 would be closer to 134,836 for the combined attendance, 67,303 for Night 1, and 67,533 for Night 2 based on WrestleTix’s numbers for distributed tickets. WrestleTix had also reported that the capacity for both shows was 67,530 for Night 1 and 67,603 for Night 2.

Meltzer reported that WrestleMania 39 is currently expected to have generated live gate revenues of around $10.8 million per night’s show based on WWE’s announced figure of a combined $21.6 million gate revenue. This reportedly was up compared to last year’s WrestleMania 38 event, which drew around $8.5 million per night’s show. In regards to the reason for the large increase in gate revenue, Meltzer reported that the ticket prices for this year’s event was around 20% higher on average than last year’s event. Meltzer also reported that the record for largest ever single night gate revenue is $17.3 million for WrestleMania 32 in 2016.

In regards to pay-per-view buys, Meltzer reported that WrestleMania 39 is currently estimated to have generated around 22,700 buys for Night 1 and 22,900 for Night 2, which are both down compared to last year’s 24,100 buys for Night 1 and 24,500 buys for Night 2 of WrestleMania 38.

Meltzer also reported that his sources confirmed Fightful’s report that WWE officials had always planned for Roman Reigns to defeat Cody Rhodes and retain his Undisputed WWE Universal Championship at the event. Meltzer reported that only a few people within WWE knew of the exact plans for the match and its finish beforehand and had kept it as a big secret from everyone else in the company.