Royal Rumble 2025 drew what WWE claimed was the third-biggest gate in company history, which indicates that in real-time dollars, it was higher than the $17.3 million that WWE announced it generated for Wrestlemania 32 in 2016 in Arlington, Texas. WWE didn’t reveal a specific dollar amount for the Rumble gate.
The gate for the Rumble at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis is approximately the eighth-highest in pro wrestling history, when adjusting for inflation. Standing ahead of this year’s Royal Rumble are the second day of Collision In Korea, Wrestlemania in 2018 in New Orleans, Wrestlemania in 2017 in Orland, Saturday and Sunday of Wrestlemania last year in Philadelphia, Wrestlemania in 2019 in New Jersey, and, still the all-time leading when adjusting for CPI, Wrestlemania 32 in Arlington. The latter’s $17.3 million gate (including fees), is equal to about $23 million today.
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With increasing ticket prices and greater demand, it’s another of many gate records set by WWE lately. Many of the more recent records are with the caveat of being in an arena.
WrestleTix estimated the tickets distributed count for the Rumble at 67,590. Amusingly, WWE indicated two different attendance numbers during Paul Levesque’s appearance at the post-show press conference. A graphic displayed that the attendance was 65,470 at the same moment Levesque read off the attendance as 70,347.
Given the high ticket prices we’ve seen for this year’s Wrestlemania in Las Vegas, I wouldn’t rule out either or both days surpassing the $23 million mark.
Netflix’s top 10 TV show rankings revealed international viewership for the Royal Rumble. Through two days, it had 2.1 million global views — which is similar to a global household average minute average measurement. Remember that doesn’t include any U.S. viewership as WWE premium live events are on Peacock, not Netflix. It’s difficult to put this 2.1 million global views number in context as we don’t have much to compare it to. We do have information that two years ago, the Royal Rumble was viewed by about 2 million Peacock accounts in the U.S., but that measures a different geography that this non-U.S. international viewership number, and, further, the Peacock number could be a measure of unique accounts, as opposed to this averaged-by-duration measurement. Another not-so-great comparison is that we reported last year Wrestlemania was watched by an average of 2.7 million to 2.9 million Peacock accounts — again, U.S. only, and we don’t have international viewing data for Wrestlemania last year.
Brandon Thurston has written about wrestling business since 2015. He operates and owns Wrestlenomics.