WWE News: Orlando Confirms Bid To Host ‘WrestleMania 33’ — Minneapolis Out Of The Running
Everyone is focused on WrestleMania 32, as it is less than three months away, and no one is quite sure what plans are in place for it yet. Still, there’s time to put that together, but it’s never too early to start planning for next year. It was originally thought that Minneapolis, Minnesota, was going to hold the event, but rumors have a way of falling apart and now there is a new front-runner to host WrestleMania 33 — Orlando, Florida.
According to PW Inside, WWE has now moved on from possibly holding next year’s big pay-per-view in Minnesota. It appear as if Orlando is very high on the list of possible locations to host the event in 2017.
It is not yet known if a final decision has yet been made on where WrestleMania 33 will be held, but it appears things have been really busy lately on getting it to Orlando.
The Orlando Sentinel has now confirmed that Orlando has made a bid to WWE to host the event next year. Heather Fagan is the deputy chief of staff for Mayor Buddy Dyer, and she has said that the anticipation is high.
“We have not received any notification and are waiting to hear just like other cities.”
This would not be the first time that Orlando has hosted a WrestleMania, and it wasn’t that long ago that the last event was there. Back in 2008, the Citrus Bowl held an outside WrestleMania XXIV and it was in front of a packed house of 72,744 fans.
It was a huge event that included The Undertaker defeating Edge for the World Heavyweight Championship in the main event, Floyd Mayweather taking on Big Show, and Shawn Michaels defeating Ric Flair in the retirement match for The Nature Boy.
The Orlando area already has a huge WWE presence already with the Performance Center in Winter Park, and NXT holding its weekly taping at Full Sail University, also in Winter Park. There has been talk over the past few years that WWE is also looking for a location to have a physical Hall of Fame and Orlando has been a front-runner for that as well.
Should Orlando win the bid for WrestleMania 33, it would be held at the Citrus Bowl once again and it was just recently renovated. Back in 2008, WrestleMania XXIV was said to have brought in around $50 million to Central Florida.
WWE does repeat venues at times for WrestleMania, but they do like to move it around as much as possible. This year, WrestleMania 32 will be held at AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas, and here are the locations of the last five:
- WrestleMania 31 – Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California
- WrestleMania XXX – Mercedes-Benz Superdome in New Orleans, Louisiana
- WrestleMania 29 – MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey
- WrestleMania XXVII – Georgia Dome in Atlanta, Georgia
- WrestleMania XXVI – University of Phoenix Stadium in Glendale, Arizona
WrestleMania 31 was on March 29 last year, and just a couple days later, WWE made the official announcement for this year’s location. On April 3, 2015, it was announced by WWE and AT&T Stadium that WrestleMania 32 would be heading to the home of the Dallas Cowboys.
That being said, one may think that next year’s location, wherever it may be, will be announced sometime around or after WrestleMania 32 on April 3.
Orlando has hosted a lot of big events across the worlds of music, entertainment, movies, and professional sports. They’ve held the biggest event of WWE’s year before, but are hoping to be lucky enough to host WrestleMania 33, especially now that Minneapolis appears to totally be out of the picture.
[Image via WWE]
