This year’s Survivor Series will include two WarGames matches, the first time the concept has been utilized for a main roster pay-per-view.
The Ringer, which has a working relationship with WWE, was the outlet that revealed the concept for this year’s event and spoke with Paul Levesque, the company’s chief content officer.
We’ll have a men’s WarGames match and a women’s WarGames match. The tradition of the Survivor Series has ebbed and flowed and changed slightly over time, but this will be similar to that.
This will not be Raw versus SmackDown. It will be much more story-line driven. I still look at it as a traditional component to Survivor Series in there because it’s large teams of people competing. We just upped the ante a little bit with WarGames and made it evolve.
The idea of WarGames will replace the Raw vs. SmackDown theme that Survivor Series has utilized on a yearly basis and had felt outdated for a long time.
WarGames was developed by Jim Crockett Promotions and introduced at the Great American Bash in July 1987 at The Omni where The Road Warriors, Dusty Rhodes, Nikita Koloff, and Paul Ellering defeated Ric Flair, Arn Anderson, Lex Luger, Tully Blanchard, and J.J. Dillon.
The concept became a signature for JCP and later WCW with over thirty versions of WarGames throughout their joint history.
In 2017, the concept was adopted by WWE and introduced at NXT TakeOver in November that year and became its own annual event. Two years later, they added a women’s match. Under the NXT 2.0 banner, they staged two WarGames matches last December.
In speaking with The Ringer, Levesque also shared his viewpoint on utilizing blood, which was a hallmark of past WarGames matches:
The world has changed. The world has evolved. I don’t think it’s necessary,” Levesque said. There is still blood in WWE, but there are medical personnel to check on wrestlers if there is an inadvertent cut. “If we have talent that gets [cut open], usually you’ll see them roll out and they’ll get looked at to make sure that there’s nothing dangerous,” Levesque added. “I’m just of the opinion right now, given the state of the world and the pandemic, and at the end of the day, what we do is dangerous enough without intentionally making it more dangerous. Yes, we did [feature bleeding] for a long period of time, but we’ve changed that practice. And it’s irresponsible to go back.
Survivor Series takes place from the TD Garden in Boston on Saturday, November 26th.
WrestleTix reported that the event sold out on the day of the public on-sale last month.
