The Royal Rumble is a professional wrestling pay-per-view event, produced every January by professional wrestling promotion WWE. The event is named after the Royal Rumble match, a Battle royal match whose participants enter at timed intervals.

With the exception of the initial Royal Rumble event in 1988, which was shown as a television special on USA Network, the Royal Rumble has been shown on pay-per-view (first in 1989) and is one of WWE's "Big Four", along with WrestleMania, SummerSlam, and Survivor Series. The Royal Rumble is considered one of WWE's most popular pay-per-view events.

History

Event

The Royal Rumble is a pay-per-view consisting of the Royal Rumble match, championship matches, and various other matches. The first Royal Rumble took place on January 24, 1988 and was broadcast live on the USA Network. The following year, the event started to be broadcast on pay-per-view and thus became one of WWE's "big four" pay-per-views, along with WrestleMania, Survivor Series, and SummerSlam.

Royal Rumble (2016) was a professional wrestling pay-per-view (PPV) event produced by WWE. It took place on January 24, 2016, at Amway Center in Orlando, Florida. It was the 29th event in the Royal Rumble chronology. This was the fifth Royal Rumble to be held in the state of Florida (1990, 1991, 1995, and 2006) and the first pay-per-view event at Amway Center since it opened in 2010.

Six matches were contested at the event, with one match contested on the pre-show. In the main event, the returning Triple H won the Royal Rumble match by eliminating Dean Ambrose to win the WWE World Heavyweight Championship, becoming the third person to win from entrant number 30 and the first since John Cena in 2008. The defending champion Roman Reigns was also eliminated by Triple H. The Royal Rumble featured the WWE debut of longtime Total Nonstop Action Wrestling (TNA) mainstay AJ Styles.

Background

Royal Rumble consisted of professional wrestling matches that involved wrestlers from pre-existing scripted feuds or storylines that played out on WWE's primary television programs, Raw and SmackDown. Wrestlers portrayed heroes, villains, or more ambiguous characters as they followed a series of events that built tension and culminated in a wrestling match or series of matches.

Royal Rumble (1999) was the twelfth annual Royal Rumble professional wrestling pay-per-view event produced by the World Wrestling Federation (WWF). It took place on January 24, 1999, at the Arrowhead Pond in Anaheim, California. The title of the event was taken from a promise by Mr. McMahon that the first entrant in the Royal Rumble, Stone Cold Steve Austin, had "no chance in hell" of winning the match. The theme song for the event, based on the phrase, would go on to become the entrance music for McMahon's stable The Corporation and later, just McMahon himself, which he uses to this day.

The main event was the annual Royal Rumble match, which saw the winner receive a title shot for the WWF Championship at the WrestleMania pay-per-view two months later. The Royal Rumble centered on the continuing heated rivalry between Stone Cold Steve Austin and Mr. McMahon, with those men entering the main event at #1 and #2, respectively. The penultimate match for the WWF Championship was an "I Quit" match between Mankind and The Rock, which is remembered both for its brutality and its place in the documentary film Beyond the Mat. Lower down on the card the WWF Intercontinental Championship and WWF Women's Championship were both defended.

Royal Rumble (2007) was the twentieth annual Royal Rumble professional wrestling pay-per-view event produced by World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE). It took place on January 28, 2007, at the AT&T Center in San Antonio, Texas and featured talent from the Raw, SmackDown! and ECW brands. This marked the first time that the new ECW brand participated in the Royal Rumble match. As has been customary since 1993, the Royal Rumble match winner received a match at that year's WrestleMania, (in this instance: WrestleMania 23) for his choice at either the WWE Championship, the World Heavyweight Championship or the ECW World Championship.

Five professional wrestling matches were featured on the event's supercard, a scheduling of more than one main event. The main event was the annual 30-man Royal Rumble match, which featured wrestlers from all three brands. The Undertaker, the thirtieth entrant, won the match by last eliminating Shawn Michaels, the twenty-third entrant. The primary match on the Raw brand was a Last Man Standing match for the WWE Championship between John Cena and Umaga. Cena won the match and retained the title after Umaga was unable to get to his feet before the referee counted to ten. The predominant match on the SmackDown! brand was Batista versus Mr. Kennedy for the World Heavyweight Championship, which Batista won by pinfall after executing a Batista Bomb. The featured match on the ECW brand was between Bobby Lashley and Test for the ECW World Championship, which Lashley won after Test was counted out.