When it comes to wrestling, there’s no bigger brand than the WWE. Being the biggest in the business comes with a few perks, including the opportunity to expand your brand far and wide, and through many different mediums. That’s exactly what the WWE did, and what we’re discussing today, some of the WWE’s best franchise expansions in its over 70 years dominating the airwaves.
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Wrestling Games
Long before gaming became the multi-billion dollar industry it is today, the WWE hopped in with the first WWF SmackDown! game in 2000. It has since developed into the hugely popular WWE 2K series and, for some modern fans, it was their first introduction to the franchise. These titles allowed players to relive iconic moments and tell their own stories using the SmackDown and Raw rosters.
The types of games varied greatly – there were also online slot games like WWE Legends: Link & Win. This tie-in game joined other thematic slots inspired by wrestling, like Lucha Legends. It’s common for online slots to have creative themes, with some revolving around common activities. Hit slots like Big Bass Bonanza are themed around fishing, while wrestling slots represent the WWE and other promotions or traditions in an expanding market of online slots.
Thanks to these expansions, the WWE brand launches much further than terrestrial television. It’s a savvy way to modernize the franchise and keep the WWE, and wrestling culture at large, alive in today’s increasingly online world.
Brand Extensions
Our next example isn’t necessarily an expansion, but it’s a smart system that helps the WWE reach new audiences and provide a more varied, dynamic viewing experience. That would be the brand extension. If you’re here, you already know that a brand extension is where a promotion splits its rosters into distinct sub-brands under the larger WWE umbrella.
Everybody knows its two main brands – SmackDown and Raw – but the WWE have kept up this brand splitting system as they’ve grown. They welcomed NXT to the WWE family in 2010, and it has since served as a stomping ground for new talent before they graduate to the big leagues. Now in 2025, we have a fourth brand extension Evolve which harvests talent directly from the WWE’s own Performance Centers.
By adding variety within the brand, each can gather its own audience while promoting friendly competition between them, and providing dedicated fans with more content, different personalities, and viewable events. When unified under a single WWE brand, certain stars and events get lost in the noise, and the broader WWE brand isn’t as powerful or ubiquitous as it could be.
Streaming Partnerships
Earlier, we mentioned expanding beyond terrestrial television, and that’s exactly what the WWE had in mind when they inked a streaming partnership with Netflix in 2024. The $5 billion move kicked off a 10-year partnership where Monday Night Raw would now stream on the streaming platform. It marked a shift away from linear TV, toward streaming and other online sources quantified by Nielsen.
This partnership isn’t just changing where viewers watch wrestling; it’s also changing longstanding trends in the industry. For example, anyone would tell you that WrestleMania is the biggest event of the wrestling calendar. However, according to Netflix’s data for the first half of 2025, it was actually Royal Rumble 2025 (WWE’s Netflix debut) that beat both WrestleMania days – 6.9 million against a 2.6 million average.
These are three of the most impactful franchise expansions we’ve seen in the WWE so far. Their most successful gambits have been motivated by one thing – keeping up with the times and changing viewership patterns of the audience. As those behaviors keep changing, we can expect the WWE to shift priorities and expand the franchise to stay dominant in the wrestling industry.
