What’s the story?
Subscribers to Dave Meltzer’s Wrestling Observer Newsletter may already be aware that the ratings have been released for this past Sunday’s Money in the Bank pay-per-view. All in all, they make for something of a mixed bag, although noticeably the main event earned a particularly impressive rating.
The Context
Even though Meltzer has said before that his ratings shouldn’t necessarily be taken as the gospel, it’s worth noting when a match receives a rating of more than four stars. And surprise, surprise, that’s exactly what happened at Money in the Bank, when the six-man main event got a strong 4.5 stars.
For a bit of context, since the turn of 2013, we’ve only seen two WWE matches manage to best that score.
The heart of the matter
Those two matches were AJ Styles vs. John Cena from this year’s Royal Rumble, and the Triple Threat bout between Cena, Seth Rollins and Brock Lesnar at the 2015 show. That in itself also means that Styles now has three match ratings of 4-and-a-half stars or more for this year alone.
And in terms of Money in the Bank matches, only the inaugural contest from WrestleMania 21 and the two Raw ladder matches from 2013 and 2014 have been able to match 4.5 stars. No other match of that kind has been able to reach those lofty heights—no pun intended.
Meanwhile, the Naomi vs Lana match for the WWE SmackDown Women's Championship match got a paltry rating of just 1.
Parallels from history
Moving away from Money in the Bank history and looking at recent pay-per-view history in general, this ratings news continues something of a recent trend. Both Backlash, in May, and Extreme Rules, earlier in June, saw most matches on the card receive run-of-the-mill ratings in the two-to-three-star region, save for one four-plus bout to punctuate the show.
Author’s take
While you could argue that it would be good to see multiple four-plus-star matches on a single PPV, at least we had the one to shout about. With some awesome spots and brilliant moment of storytelling between AJ Styles and Shinsuke Nakamura, it really was a high-quality PPV match.
Then again, with that kind of a line-up, perhaps four-and-a-half stars is all we should have expected from this one.
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