WrestleMania IX is, historically, not good. So the brief here is immediately quite funny: make a prestige documentary about a show that everyone knows is a bit shit, without actually saying it’s a bit shit. And to their credit, they kind of half-manage it. There’s the usual corporate throat-clearing about ‘spectacle’ and ‘evolution’ and vegas glitz but every now and then it slips. You get little moments where they admit ticket sales were ropey, that bringing in Hogan late was a bit of a panic move, that parts of the show just… didn’t work. They never fully go there, obviously – this is still a house style production – but there’s enough half-truth honesty to keep it interesting. The best stuff is just the footage. This weird transitional moment where the old guard is hanging around, the new lot aren’t quite ready, and everything feels slightly off. A proper end-of-an-era/beginning-of-a-wobbly-new-one energy that the film occasionally taps into without ever quite articulating. I did want more, especially on the messier bits (the Hogan stuff in particular feels like it’s being gently ushered past) but it was always going to be this kind of documentary. So yeah, not even close to what it could be, but it’s a charming enough watch if you care about that era

Good doc peeking behind the scenes before we were fully invited behind the curtain.

It wasn’t as good as I expected.

WrestleMania IX: Becoming a Spectacle (2025) Retro Doc on WM 9 Peacook A valiant effort to rehab the image of WrestleMania 9 (which at the time came off as one of the worst WMs up to that point. That being said I did like the interviews and behind-the-scenes antics that this doc had to provide (them constantly having to refer to it as the WWE when it was a decade before they had to rebrand and 'get the F Out' irked me though)