WWE’s all-conquering partnership with Netflix has rightly earned plenty of plaudits.
After more than 30 years on linear television, WWE moved its flagship Monday Night Raw show to the streaming giant in January of this year.
In a whopping $5bn deal, Netflix bagged not only the US rights to Raw, but also all of its major Premium Live Events such as WrestleMania, SummerSlam, and Royal Rumble.
The scope of the broadcast arrangement casts a wide net internationally, too. In the UK for instance, all WWE programming sits on Netflix, including shows such as SmackDown that still air on television in the States.
There’s a handy back catalogue, too, for fans looking for a slice of yesteryear – all previous WrestleManias, for example, were added to the site this year, along with stacks of archive episodes of Raw and SmackDown thrown in, too.
But for all the good that’s been a part of WWE’s run on Netflix thus far – including subtitles which have given wrestlers more than they bargained for – eagle-eyed fans have picked up on something they weren’t expecting.
Looking back at the Netflix footage of 2024’s WrestleMania XL, X account WrestleTubePC has flagged the fairly crude addition of what appears to be fake crowd noise at a pivotal moment of one top match.
Near the climax of the multi tag-team ladder match, audio of fans chanting ‘this is awesome’ has been dubbed over the top of the original, after Tomasso Ciampa had delivered an Air Raid Crash on Tyler Bate from a ladder.
Fans live in the packed arena needed no convincing as to the ‘awesomeness’ of the spot and, in fairness, that doesn’t appear to have been WWE or Netflix’s intention.
The alteration appears to have been a case of attempted censorship. First time around, fans could be heart chanting: ‘Holy s****!’ – a very familiar refrain of grappling goers for many a year now and certainly not a new sensation for 2025.
Attempts to at least censor the bad language might be understandable enough, but some were less than impressed with how poorly and blatantly it was done.
“Zero benefit to them doing this,” stated one reply, while another asked: “Why would they do this?”
A third wrote: “It’s like someone at TKO wants WWE to stay PG even in the streaming days,” while a fourth bemoaned: “If they are gonna do that at least make it believable.”
Some supported the move, though, with one saying: “I don’t mind it, I have friends with young kids who love watching the shows, but have to mute them whenever a ‘holy s***’ chant starts.
“Giving fans the option of watching the uncensored version alongside this new, censored version is paramount though.”
The development may have come as something of a surprise given that hints had suggested WWE may enjoy less censorship on Netflix than they’d been used to on television.
Prior to the January launch, Chief Content Officer Paul ‘Triple H’ Levesque had said: “Right now, just as an example of us being on FOX, if the crowd chants: ‘Holy s***’ or something much worse, they just take that audio.
“Sometimes they take the picture and the audio off, and it’s just a black screen…”
Adding the example of The Rock, famed for turning the air blue, Triple H added at the time: “[He] does what he does, [but] we won’t have those issues with Netflix.”
Levesque has since reinforced that, any potential censorship aside, the streaming giant retains zero influence in WWE’s actual creative output – he and the wrestling organisation still having full say on storylines and rivalries.
He told the BBC: “We create the superstars, we create the storylines. We do all of that and the world watches.”
The in-ring legend added that Netflix does, however, have final say on: “How long the show is, when we go off air, or what time we’re on air.” This reinforces recent reports that a recent Raw match on Netflix was significantly cut short due to running times.
Irrespective of timings, censors have already had a hard time keeping up with WWE and its crowds in 2025 episodes of Raw and SmackDown.
In a recent episode of the red brand show, fans’ abusive chants at John Cena couldn’t be cut out fast enough as a raucous atmosphere got stuck into the action.
