Original Plans For WrestleMania Main Event & Cutting the Battle Royal; Which Top Match Was Almost Shortened?

Source: F4WOnline.com

WrestleMania 31When WWE was writing the script for WrestleMania, original plans called for Brock Lesnar and Roman Reigns going about 25-30 minutes in the main event for the WWE World Heavyweight Championship. Seth Rollins still would have cashed-in his Money in the Bank contract, and nothing would have changed, it just would have been substantially longer. 

When they timed out the show during the weekend, it was obvious that there wouldn’t be enough room for all 8 matches as they were. The segment with The Rock and Ronda Rousey went about 24-minutes, so they needed to take it from somewhere. 

There was talk of taking the time out of Bray Wyatt vs. The Undertaker, but ultimately with how physical it was and how banged up Lesnar and Reigns were by the end, they made the right decision. 

It was announced the day before WrestleMania that the Andre the Giant memorial battle royal had to be moved to the pre-show, which now would have one hour of previews and one hour of wrestling before the “actual show” began. It was between the battle royal and the Divas tag team match for who would get cut. Given that they bumped the Divas match from WrestleMania 29 and the ongoing #GiveDivasaChance social media movement, it wasn’t a great option at the time. 

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