WWE will race into the Motor City this weekend for its annual SummerSlam event. The biggest match of the show will unsurprisingly feature the hottest angle the company’s had in a generation. With The Bloodline completely cracked, Roman Reigns will put his WWE Undisputed Universal Championship on the line against his own kin. ‘Main Event’ Jey Uso will challenge Reigns for the title and hopes to end the monumental run that Roman has been on for nearly three straight years.
It takes a lot of brashness to run a three-year title reign in this era. Oftentimes, before this historic reign began, a fan could take a look at the longest-reigning WWE Champions. They’d be in awe of the fact that Bruno Sammartino, Hulk Hogan, Pedro Morales, Bob Backlund, and more would hold the championship for 1,000+ days. Pro wrestling was different back in the 1970s and 1980s. They didn’t have weekly television shows, Pay-Per-View and streaming specials, and live events on top of that.
The biggest boom period that WWE and the wrestling business has ever seen came in the mid-1990s. WWE’s Attitude Era captivated an entire generation of fans. And if you took a look at the length of title reigns, then? Most of them were incredibly short. Kane, chief among them, famously had a one-day WWE Championship reign after defeating Stone Cold Steve Austin. The very next night on Raw, Austin won the championship back. Even after the Attitude Era’s dust settled, long championship reigns were a rarity.
John Bradshaw Layfield held the championship longer than anyone for nearly seven years from 2004-2005. Then, John Cena went on a marathon reign with the title from September 18, 2006, to October 7, 2007, for 380 days. CM Punk’s 434-day reign became the longest of the modern era in 2012, and then Brock Lesnar held the WWE Universal Championship for 504 days.
So the fact that Reigns has held the championship since August 30, 2020, is incredible to fully grasp. There have been many times in the reign when fans have thought it could come to an end. In the beginning, many wanted Kevin Owens to take the championship from Reigns in December 2020 and January 2021. Then, at Clash of the Castle in Cardiff, Wales, fans were almost unanimously behind Drew McIntyre. Yet, Reigns came away victorious in their September 2022 collision.
Then, of course, at Elimination Chamber this past February, fans were behind the resilient Sami Zayn. Still, even though the match was in Zayn’s hometown of Montreal, Roman stood tall. At WrestleMania 39, fans were sure that Cody Rhodes was going to do it. Rhodes’ “Finish the Story” mantra became something of a rallying cry. And yet, when the dust settled in Los Angeles, Reigns stood tall yet again.
At any one of those opportunities, WWE could have brought the Bloodline storyline to a satisfying ending. It’s been years since the company has seen such successful long-term storytelling, but with the Bloodline continuing to dominate screens, WWE also ran the risk of fans growing tired of the storyline and asking for something different. Specifically, with so much fan support behind Zayn and Rhodes, that felt like one of the biggest gambles they had made yet to keep going.
With the win over Rhodes at WWE’s showcase event, Roman won at WrestleMania for three consecutive years. Three straight successful title defenses at WrestleMania is a feat that not even Hogan did at the peak of Hulkamania. Neither Austin nor The Rock can claim that feat either. So the championship reign puts Roman Reigns in rarified air. It’s hard to argue that he deserves or earned that crown now, either, despite a lot of Internet bluster for years.
Although they took that roll of the dice, WWE hasn’t dealt with any sort of “Bloodline fatigue.” Television ratings suggest quite the opposite, in fact. The Bloodline, and anything involving members of The Bloodline, are still the hottest and most-watched acts on the Smackdown broadcast. The numbers have only continued to grow through the spring and summer as the focus turned to the “Bloodline Civil War,” pitting The Usos against Reigns and Solo Sikoa.
Citing Wrestlenomics, we charted the data from August 5, 2022, to the most recent episode of Smackdown on July 28, 2023. Across the board, the quarters that the Bloodline members appear in or are in the bulk of do extraordinarily well, and amazingly, even after multiple years, the numbers are still trending upwards.
The height of the story thus far came on July 7, 2023. At WWE’s home of Madison Square Garden, the Bloodline got all or a chunk of the first three quarters. And it paid off big for WWE, as the segment peaked at over 3,000,000 viewers that night, according to data cited by Wrestlenomics. Unsurprisingly, taking in the average of all the quarters of the last year, that night saw the highest average for the Bloodline as well, at 2,820,000.
Furthermore, the Bloodline angle has been doing just as well, if not better at times, compared to the average viewership of the entire show. In researching the numbers, we charted the data on the average quarterlies for the Bloodline segments versus the average viewership of Smackdown from August 5, 2022, through July 28, 2023. Reigns, the Usos, Solo Sikoa, and Paul Heyman oftentimes delivered the goods with their supporting casts. They quickly became the appeal of the entire show, with red-hot moments on the road to the Royal Rumble and WrestleMania. And, of course, the aforementioned Madison Square Garden episode. On that night, the average for Bloodline segments hit 2,820,000 versus the 2,561,000 average for the show on the whole.
There was a slight viewership decline after WrestleMania, but they have since been able to rally back significantly, building towards Reigns’ championship match with Jey Uso. There was going to always be a drop-off after that MSG peak. But it will prove interesting now as SummerSlam approaches.
This weekend presents another logical point where the story could reach its climax and come to an end. The Bloodline famously began in 2020 when Jey Uso was forced to “acknowledge” Reigns as the tribal chief, thereby launching everything into motion. At SummerSlam, WWE has the opportunity to end the Bloodline saga by arriving back at the starting point and coming full circle. Reigns appears to be ready to take a break from television, and that could help give the time and space for a new storyline to begin. If that happens, Smackdown could see a slight dip in the ratings, and it will be interesting to see what The Usos do.
Whether WWE chooses to go that route or continue with Reigns as the champion remains to be seen. But if the numbers tell the story, fans aren’t ready to see the Bloodline storyline end just yet, as the interest, ratings, and business has arguably never been better for WWE in the modern era. The performances have been so good by everyone involved that they have sparked memes of “this is cinema” to become as familiar as “Do you smell what The Rock is cookin’?” for WWE fans. By any metric, the Bloodline story is one for the books.
[Data cited by Wrestlenomics Patreon]
