The Magnificent Seven: The 7 Worst WWE PPV Main Events Of All Time

Make no mistake about it—there are a lot of great PPV main events in WWE’s history. While they weren’t exactly great matches from a fully objective standpoint, showdowns like Hulk Hogan and Mr. T and Roddy Piper and Paul Orndorff or Hogan vs. Andre were exactly the spectacles that the time period and the talents involved demanded. Even in the less work-rate intensive days of yore, there are a few real diamonds in the rough, too, like Hulk Hogan vs. Randy Savage at WrestleMania 5, or vs. The Ultimate Warrior at WrestleMania 6. As much as some folks balk at the Attitude Era’s tendency toward car crash booking, that period also has some great main event performances from guys like Shawn Michaels, Steve Austin, and Triple H. Despite fans giving him a hard time for most of his time on top, John Cena has held up his end of the bargain for a deceptively high number of four-star-plus main event classics.

But as much as WWE has done well in many cases, there are those times when the company’s main event efforts have flopped. Sometimes performers or the circumstnaces they’re thrown into don’t click. Sometimes the booking sets up otherwise able wrestlers for failure. Sometimes everything goes wrong.

This countdown focuses on matches in a vacuum (as opposed to whole feuds), though I did use what the match represented historically and its aftermath as secondary considerations.

#7. Randy Orton vs. Jinder Mahal, Battleground 2017

Against my better judgment, I was actually a bit excited to watch Randy Orton and Jinder Mahal square off in a Punjabi Prison Match at Battleground 2017. No, I wasn’t expecting a five-star classic, no I wasn’t much of a fan of Randy Orton’s main event work at this stage of his career, and no, I had not bought into Mahal as WWE Champion or a viable main event talent. I didn’t even expect the excitement of a title change, as the use of a gimmick match that favored Mahal seemed like a way of protecting Orton and furthering the heel’s reign. Putting all of these factors aside, I had fond memories of the odd-ball Batista-Great Khali Punjabi Prison Match from a decade earlier and thought this rarely used speciality match could provide a fun spectacle.

This match was not fun. Nor was it good.

Jim Ross dissected a bit of why the match went poorly on his podcast, acknowledging that the duel cage structure invites even fewer near falls than a traditional cage match, besides which the duel cages with thicker bars made it hard to get clear sightlines for cameras. Combine these intrinsic challenges with Mahal’s middling work and Orton not exactly setting the world on fire at this point in his career, and you have match for which the only real highlights were The Singh Brothers taking big bumps. You know, the Sing Brothers who were supposed to be locked out.

The Great Khali’s surprise return to help Mahal worked reasonably well, but given his limited mobility, fading physique, and that he’d been firmly entrenched in the mid-card when he was last a regular part of WWE programming, he didn’t exactly produce a lot of electricity either, past the initial novelty of seeing the big guy again.

We can debate whether this match was helped or hurt by going at the end of a pretty bad PPV leading up to it. Regardless, it arrives on the short list for WWE’s worst PPV main events.

#6. The Undertaker vs. The Dudley Boyz, Great American Bash 2004

For as fondly as most of us remember Eddie Guerrero now, and as much as WWE celebrates his legacy at this point, there was a time when the company demonstrated less faith in Latino Heat. In 2004, he was the reigning WWE Champion, and WWE opted to place his title defense against (and loss to) JBL earlier in the card, in favor of placing more surefire main event draw The Undertaker in a position to close the show.

The trouble is, The Undertaker wasn’t in a main event program—he was feuding with The Dudley Boyz, who had never been treated as a main event property in WWE and were mostly serving as a proxy for Paul Heyman. The Deadman worked a handicap match against the team in a match that would have been just fine as a TV main event, but was thoroughly underwhelming as a PPV headliner.

The match is, of course, made all the worse by its aftermath. Per pre-match stipulation, The Undertaker’s long-time associate Paul Bearer would be buried in cement—you know, murdered–depending on the outcome. The Undertaker won, only for him to flip the switch to bury Bearer himself. This may have looked like a heel turn, but WWE instead seemed to recognize the whole angle was dumb and have The Dead Man explain Bearer was a liability and go on to continue his face run shortly thereafter, challenging JBL for the title and leaving this whole mess forgotten—probably the best choice for all parties involved.

#5. Randy Orton vs. Bray Wyatt, No Mercy 2016

No Mercy 2016 had the misfortune of airing opposite a presidential debate between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. WWE seemed to accept the loss in this case—that it would only realistically retain the wealth of its audience for a Smackdown-only B-PPV until the debate started, so they kicked off the show with the world title triple threat between AJ Styles, John Cena, and Dean Ambrose. That match would have gone down as a perfectly solid, if unexceptional PPV main event. The Randy Orton vs. Bray Wyatt match that did main event? It’s remembered a bit less fondly.

Orton-Wyatt suffered from a complete absence of stakes, and not being a particularly hot feud going into this show. Add in that neither man put in a memorable performance and you have a lackluster main event for which even the surprise turn at the finish felt underwhelming—mid-card Luke Harper not all that shockingly coming back to cost Orton the match. One of the few redeeming qualities of this main event, in retrospect, was that of the trilogy of high profile PPV matches Orton and Wyatt would have over the course of a year’s time, this was, admittedly, the least awful of them (see their wretched WrestleMania WWE Championship match, and the abomination that was the House of Horrors).

To make matters just a nudge worse for this one, there was an excellent Dolph Ziggler-Miz match over the Intercontinental championship, with Ziggler’s career on the line, that easily could have occupied the main event spot, sent fans home happy, and helped elevate the IC title that extra nudge for the main event rub.

#4. The Extreme Elimination Chamber, December to Dismember 2006

In 2006, WWE relaunched ECW as its own brand. The idea had potential, for cashing in on nostalgia and the final ounces of competent wrestling many original ECW stars had left in them, besides running a quasi-developmental brand that was, in a sense, a forerunner to today’s NXT. The brand suffered from a number of problems, though, ranging from RVD quickly imploding and when he got busted with marijuana shortly after being crowned the face of the brand, and Kurt Angle bolting from WWE altogether. Soon, Vince McMahon marginalized Paul Heyman in his creative role, and we were left with nothing more than a third brand, with a lesser roster and the old ECW legacy to always fall short of.

December to Dismember may represent the nadir of the ECW experiment. Yes, it had a good opener, with The Hardy Boyz tearing it up against MNM—each team visitors, not fixtures of the ECW brand. It’s hard to rate anything else on the card above two stars, and the main event came across as particularly tone deaf. The Elimination Chamber had far too many bells and whistles for something authentically ECW, and the match featured Bobby Lashley, The Big Show, RVD, CM Punk, Hardcore Holly, and Test. In their primes—both in terms of ability and kayfabe standing, Lashley, Show, Van Dam, and Punk were believable main eventers. At this point? Show was at just about his worst and Van Dam had become a non-factor in the title picture after he blew his big opportunity. McMahon didn’t yet believe in Punk as anything but a mid-carder and booked him as such. And Lashley? Lashley had blue-chip prospect written all over him, but the guy wasn’t ready to carry a brand as a character nor as a worker, and WWE thrusting him into the top spot was confirmation that this ECW was not in any meaningful way going to cater to the original ECW audience.

The result was a joyless, largely directionless plunderfest that culminated in a finish no one was particularly happy about. Not a great look for a main event.

#3. Hulk Hogan vs. Sid Justice, WrestleMania 8

Hulk Hogan got by on middling main event matches during an era when WWE and its fans were perfectly content to privilege sizzle over steak. A part of why the dynamic worked was that fans were just excited to see the guy and to see him win decisively to blow off any number of heated rivalries.

There were a lot of problems with Hogan’s blow off match with Sid Justice at WrestleMania 8. Though the build was reasonable enough for its time, and Sid looked the part of a viable challenger to Hogan, the heel simply didn’t have the in-ring skillset to carry a match. Add in Hogan working within his usual limitations. Add WWE not wanting to book a conclusive finish because Hogan was, at least theoretically, transitioning from the wrestling business to movie stardom while Sid was, at least theoretically, sticking around for the long haul; meanwhile, WWE didn’t want to send fans home unhappy at the end of a ‘Mania.

So, we got a mercifully short, bad match, capped by a totally botched schmozz finish. New heel Papa Shango was supposed to break up Hogan’s final pin on Justice but missed his cue, causing Justice to kick out of Hogan’s leg drop, and Shango’s eventual interference to feel like more of a non-sequitur than a logical choice. In the meantime, the shocking return of The Ultimate Warrior partially redeemed the moment by distracting fans from the debacle in the ring with the pleasure of the big surprise to shake up the main event scene.

This was a bad main event in its immediate context, and history has not been kind to it. Sid would wind up leaving the company a few months later, and Warrior wouldn’t last a year. Papa Shango has become a bit of a joke, and emblematic of an era when WWE felt its most out of touch with how to develop gimmicks. Meanwhile Hogan would break his retirement in less than year, too, and be back for the following WrestleMania to much less fan fare. So, everything about this theoretically big transitional moment more or less fell apart in one big dud WWE would just as soon forget about.

#2. Diesel vs. Mabel, SummerSlam 1995

As 1994 turned to 1995, WWE took a gamble on young Diesel—an inexperienced big man who was getting over as Shawn Michaels’s heater. He moved directly into the role of world champion and face of the company. Between his limited skills, and more or less trying to fill the Hulk Hogan void, the guy wasn’t exactly set up for success. Additionally, he didn’t exactly have best set of challengers in terms of draws or workers. Mabel represented a low point.

As a five hundred pounder with good mobility, it makes sense enough that Mabel would be pushed to the main event. Maybe it was the fact that he started out with Men on a Mission. Maybe it was the purple pajama ring gear. Maybe it was his own inexperience. Regardless, Mabel simply didn’t work, and his resulting main event match with Diesel was a dud. To make matters even worse, the match didn’t even benefit from the intrigue of a potential title change, as it was abundantly clear the big guy wasn’t getting the strap.

The result was the worst main event WWE had seen up to that point, which I’d argue stood for nearly seventeen years.

#1. John Cena vs. John Laurinaitis, Over the Limit 2012

A significant portion of the fan base turned on John Cena starting in 2006. While he proved over the years that he could pull off a great match with the right dance partner, most matches between Cena and stiffs did not tend to go well and, by 2012, WWE should have known better than to book him in a PPV match with a non-wrestling talent (OK, I know John Laurinaitis had been a wrestler, but that wasn’t his role by 2012).

The resulting main event match—given WWE did decide to close the show with this match—was going to be bad, and was all but destined to make a countdown of this nature. Things got even worse, though, for the wonky face-heel dynamics to follow. Sure, Laurinaitis was a bad guy, but he was a largely heatless one, and rather than fans dying to see Cena pummel him they were largely indifferent. So, seeing Cena beat up Laurinaitis, taking the time to pull him up from pin attempts and talk trash, largely came across as a big bully beating up a scrawny victim, with none of the charm or catharsis of a Stone Cold Steve Austin getting the better of Mr. McMahon. (Oddball foot note—McMahon vs. Triple H would predate this as the only eventual father-in-law vs. son-in-law PPV main event prior to Cena-Laurinaitis. McMahon-Helmsley, while not a masterpiece, benefited from far more heat and far more fun sports entertainment shenanigans.)

Take this lousy main event, stretch it over seventeen minutes, and add in The Big Show predictably turn heel to cost Cena the match and you arrive at the single worst PPV main event in WWE history.

Which main events would you add to the list? The Undertaker vs. The Undertaker at Summerslam 1994 and Dean Ambrose vs. Bray Wyatt at TLC 2014 were among my top runners up. Let us know what you think in the comments.

Read more from Mike Chin at his website and follow him on Twitter @miketchin.