5 Strangest Locations For WWE PPV Matches

Even the pessimists are at least curious as to what the 2020 Money in the Bank ladder matches are going to look like. When you're incorporating potentially the entirety of WWE Headquarters as a battleground, the possibilities are endless. In the race to the top of the building, we could see fax machines swung like chairs, Moonsaults off of filing cabinets, chain wrestling inside an elevator, you name it. Creative license and a spark of madness do well to increase one's curiosity.

Though present global circumstances have forced WWE into thinking outside the box in this manner, this won't be the first time that a WWE pay-per-view match takes place outside the confines of a traditional arena and thousands of spectators. Through the years, different gimmick matches have called for unique locales. Some of them were terrible (and you can probably think of one shining example), but they were at least different, a special kind of pro-graps palette cleanser.

Let's stroll down memory lane for a bit, and look at a few of those times when WWE thought to stage their pay-per-view fights away from an arena.

Even the pessimists are at least curious as to what the 2020 Money in the Bank ladder matches are going to look like. When you're incorporating potentially the entirety of WWE Headquarters as a battleground, the possibilities are endless. In the race to the top of the building, we could see fax machines swung like chairs, Moonsaults off of filing cabinets, chain wrestling inside an elevator, you name it. Creative license and a spark of madness do well to increase one's curiosity.

Though present global circumstances have forced WWE into thinking outside the box in this manner, this won't be the first time that a WWE pay-per-view match takes place outside the confines of a traditional arena and thousands of spectators. Through the years, different gimmick matches have called for unique locales. Some of them were terrible (and you can probably think of one shining example), but they were at least different, a special kind of pro-graps palette cleanser.

Let's stroll down memory lane for a bit, and look at a few of those times when WWE thought to stage their pay-per-view fights away from an arena.

5. A Hollywood Backlot

Originally, the match was meant to have taken place somewhere else: the streets of Miami, when Goldust was originally slotted to work with Razor Ramon at WrestleMania 12. Following a Ramon suspension, Roddy Piper replaced "The Bad Guy," and the brawl was moved.

Though the fight did end up culminating at Anaheim's Arrowhead Pond, Piper and Goldust originally slugged it out in a narrow alleyway behind a soundstage, made even more cramped by Goldust's Cadillac. Baseball bats were swung, and Goldust tried to run Piper over.

4. Terry Funk's Double Cross Ranch

Okay, this match *didn't* happen, but it was on the table at one point for WrestleMania 14. Mick Foley proposed that he and mentor/rival Funk face off in a series of gimmick matches, leading to the mother of all deathmatches at Funk's Texas ranch, to air live during WrestleMania 14.

While Vince McMahon was on board originally, the idea was eventually nixed. With Mike Tyson coming into the WWF, putting the eyes of the mainstream media on the product, the higher-ups were skittish about having such unadulterated barbarism on the same card. Alas.

I mean, we could have talked about Bray Wyatt's Firefly Fun House here, but you already know everything there is to know about that - don't you?!

3. Stu Hart's Dungeon

If the walls of the Hart Family basement could talk, they'd share many tales of brawny wrestling prospects that met their match in Stu's personalised torture sessions. Stu's youngest son Owen returned to his old stomping grounds in 1998, bringing along a rival.

Though not quite protracted application of holds designed to make a wannabe grappler scream, Hart and Ken Shamrock combined spirited wrestling with some creative environmental offence in this brief but unique clash in Calgary. Though if Stu "had next", we'd all pity the winner.

2. Some Abandoned "House Of Horrors"

Bray Wyatt beckoned Randy Orton to some spooky domicile out in the San Jose area, one with baby dolls bound to the ceiling and a sentient lawn mower. "Final Deletion" was en vogue at the time, though WWE's attempt at absurdist brutality paled considerably to its predecessor.

The rules were a little vague, because you had to beat your opponent in the ring or win via forfeit, which seems like a faulty bit of match structuring. Factor in the disparity between night and day (dark at the house, still actually light in San Jose), and it just didn't work.

1. The Boneyard

Three years after that insipid House of Horrors debacle, WWE delivered another cinematic-style fracas, this one a vast improvement. The Undertaker's 27th WrestleMania match occurred in a graveyard (or boneyard), against a cocky, fate-tempting AJ Styles.

Undertaker and Styles brawled in something that combined a horror film with one of those cheesy-but-awesome old school action flicks that air all day on the El Rey Network. Druids, OC interference, a rooftop fight, a living burial, the Metallica soundtrack - yeah, WWE got it right this time.