WWE SmackDown expected to return to two-hour format

WWE SmackDown is not expected to remain a three-hour show. 

During a recent appearance on The Pat McAfee Show, WWE Chief Content Officer Paul “Triple H” Levesque noted that the show will eventually return to a two-hour format. 

“For right now (It’s three hours), and then it switches back to two,” Levesque said about the SmackDown runtime. 

Our own Bryan Alvarez also notes that there has been discussion of WWE SmackDown moving back to two hours beginning in June 2025. 

Levesque has addressed runtimes for WWE shows during multiple interviews recently. He spoke to the SI Media Podcast over the weekend and said that the “sweet spot” for a wrestling show is between two and three hours. 

“Sometimes you get into the two-hour show, and you just don’t have the real estate on that program to get everything in there you want to get in and all the stories that you want to get in and all the characters that you want to get in and there are people that are getting left off.”

“Sometimes 3 hours can feel long; sometimes two hours is not enough. Somewhere in the middle to me is the sweet spot,” he said.

Alvarez reports that tonight’s WWE Raw episode is expected to run for about three hours and twenty minutes.