WWE WrestleMania 38 Commercial Airs During Super Bowl 2022 Pre-Game

By Connor Casey

Super Bowl LVI's pre-game coverage featured a full 30-second advertisement from Peacock promoting WWE's upcoming WrestleMania 38 event on April 2-3 at AT&T Stadium in Arlington (Dallas), TX. The only two matches confirmed for the show so far are Universal Champion Roman Reigns vs. Brock Lesnar and SmackDown Women's Champion Charlotte Flair vs. Ronda Rousey, and the ad featured stars from both the past and present while labeling WrestleMania season with all sorts of descriptive adjectives. It ends with Pat McAfee shouting the one word WWE has associated with the event — "Stupendous!" 

WWE has not run an advertisement during the Super Bowl since 1999, and according to Dave Meltzer of the Wrestling Observer, that's because WWE Chairman Vince McMahon believes it to be a waste of money. He explained that Peacock, not WWE, paid for the advertisement. A second, 15-second ad is scheduled to air during the game itself. 

"They're not buying the commercial," Meltzer explained on Wrestling Observer Radio. "The network is buying the commercials. It's a Peacock commercial, not a WWE commercial. WrestleMania will be featured in the Peacock commercial."

"Vince has said publicly and he has said to me that it was a waste of money," Meltzer added. "That's why they never did it again. At the time everybody talked about it but for what their company is — a Super Bowl commercial for some things would work. A Super Bowl commercial for Peacock makes sense..."

One way WWE has tried to capitalize on the popularity of the Super Bowl in the past was with the Halftime Heat specials, airing in 1999, 2000 and 2019. The first, an Empty Arena match where Mankind defeated The Rock to become WWF Champion, was easily the most successful.

"I think a year earlier MTV has had a lot of success doing Celebrity Deathmatch with claymation figures — one of which was Stone Cold Steve Austin — and they'd done a tremendous rating during halftime of the Super Bowl," Foley said in an interview with ESPN ahead of the 2019 Halftime Heat. "I don't know when the idea came to Mr. McMahon to take that giant audience and kind of keep it for ourselves, but I do remember being asked about it — and then it was my suggestion that The Rock and I do an empty arena match."

"The fact that it was so completely different than anything on television was also indicative of the chances we regularly took, whether it was on the microphone or in the ring," he continued. "Later on, [that] really led to great chemistry as a tag team. We were really rolling, and it was understood that The Rock was going to go on to bigger and better things — one of them being a WrestleMania main event with Stone Cold Steve Austin."

Trending Now: