WWE experimenting with different ideas gave birth to the brand split to keep things fresh and interesting from the Attitude Era, itself. Then one more brand NXT was included and the distinction in all the shows provided major helps to boost their ratings. Down the road, it didn’t necessarily retain the success rate, mainly due to the roster’s star power going lessened.
While the brand split was restructured in 2016, keeping the fans more vested in the product, WWE was forced to call off those barriers, starting in 2019. Fans who watched the product in that year should remember that a brand invitational was introduced by the WWE at that time. This rule allowed a WWE superstar to appear on another brand.
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Charlotte Flair was one of the first superstars to get the advantage of the rule when she appeared on SmackDown even though she was assigned to the Raw brand. The brand split then literally started to fall apart with the invention of the wild card rule which was originally brought into effect after SmackDown Superstar Roman Reigns appeared on Raw to confront Vince McMahon on an episode in May 2019.
WWE’s brand split slowly disappeared from 2019 onward
The bizarre rule was even explained by the WWE through their official website to move away from the brand split which is almost over since WWE creative team was handed to Triple H and his regime. Even Vince McMahon kept that rule intact before stepping down. With that, the “Brand to Brand Invitational” has also become extinct and it’s been confirmed in recent reports.
Fightful Select is reporting that the brand split could be “effectively dead.” USA Network and FOX, which air Raw and SmackDown respectively, have also relaxed their previous ethics to be those shows noticeably different from one another and containing different star powers. According to one source close to creative, the aforementioned rule hasn’t even been discussed since Chief Content Officer Paul “Triple H” Levesque took over the charges,
“One source indicated to Fightful that the idea was met with plenty of dissents backstage in creative. One member of creative told Fightful that they haven’t personally heard the term brought up backstage at all in 2022, and don’t expect to hear about it again unless this happens to jog someone’s memory.
Another source that has worked near creative said that the rule hadn’t been brought up in the Triple H regime, and even FOX and USA Network have relaxed their insistence on distinctly different brands of late.”
In the months leading up to WrestleMania 39, plenty of WWE stars appeared on both brands, and even the match card of the Show of Shows contained a lot of cross-brand matches to vanquish the brand split and perhaps it won’t be tighter like previous in future.