WrestleMania III
WWF's 1987 WrestleMania pay-per-view
WrestleMania III was a 1987 professional wrestling pay-per-view (PPV) event produced by the World Wrestling Federation (WWF, now WWE). It was the third annual WrestleMania and was held on March 29, 1987, at the Pontiac Silverdome in Pontiac, Michigan. There were 12 matches, with the main event featuring Hulk Hogan successfully defending the WWF World Heavyweight Championship against André the Giant.
WWF claimed that paid attendance was 93,173, which would have made it the largest crowd for a WWF event as well as the largest recorded attendance of a live indoor event in North America at the time; however, retrospective analyses of the event have determined the actual attendance to be around 78,000. The event is considered to be the pinnacle of the 1980s wrestling boom, with almost one million fans watching the event at 160 closed-circuit locations in North America and the number of people watching via pay-per-view estimated at several million. The WWF generated US$1.6 million in ticket sales, and pay-per-view revenue was estimated at $10.3 million, setting a record for the time. The promotion's only event with an official higher attendance was WrestleMania 32, held at AT&T Stadium in 2016. The record for the largest indoor event stood until January 27, 1999, when it was surpassed by the papal mass with Pope John Paul II at the TWA Dome in St. Louis, Missouri, which drew an audience of 104,000.
The event garnered positive reviews, with the main event bout between Hogan and André being called one of the most iconic matches of all time, though it received criticism for its overall quality.
The public source identifies “WrestleMania III” as wWF's 1987 WrestleMania pay-per-view. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around WrestleMania, WWF's and pay-per-view.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q50817. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1987, 2016 and 1999.
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This entry incorporates text from “WrestleMania III” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.