The Rock remains a top attraction on WWE television every time he shows up irrespective of the time and place. That electricity in the air around him is sure enough to boost WWE TV ratings on either Raw or Smackdown TV. If announced beforehand, WWE is certainly capable of capitalizing even more on his appearances but they opted not to do so in recent times.
After a wait of almost 4 years, The Rock returned to WWE programming on SmackDown in September 2023. On that night, he had an altercation with Austin Theory before layin’ the smacketh’ down on him.
Royal Rumble 2024: Multi-Time Women’s Champion Eyeing Return At WWE PLE?
Then his latest appearance was on this week’s Raw which came after eight long years. Both of these appearances weren’t advertised and thus remained a surprise to the crowd which was able to garner massive pops from the audience. This was the biggest reason why WWE wanted to keep the appearance that way.
Roman Reigns And Paul Heyman React On The Rock’s Call-Out On WWE Raw
The Rock cares the most about the people’s reactions during a return
According to the reports of The Wrestling Observer, The Rock cares more about the pops from the crowd than the TV ratings since appearing in these surprise capacities in WWE is more of a “fun” thing for him at this point than making “business”. The ratings could have been much higher if he had originally announced for Raw but WWE gave importance to his stance.
“He’s doing this for fun because he doesn’t have to do it. And he’s doing it for excitement. That type of thing. That’s why when he came back Monday, it wasn’t announced at a time like if they had announced that ahead of time,” stated the source on The Rock’s surprise WWE return.
“The rating would have been much higher, much higher than it was. He was doing it because in that case, he wanted that pop because of people in the building not knowing he was going to be there. And there he is. That’s what he wants. Every time he comes back, they never announce it ahead of time. They’ll do the little tease, but they won’t do the announcement.”
Prior to the latest episode of Smackdown, WWE informed that The Rock broke its all-time social media record by drawing over 171 million views across all the platforms offered by them during this returning segment on the Day 1 edition of Raw. In response to this info, The Great One responded by saying that it was The People who broke all the records and that it wasn’t him.