Extreme Rules (2018)

The 2018 Extreme Rules was a professional wrestling pay-per-view (PPV) and livestreaming event produced by WWE, held for wrestlers from the promotion's main roster brands, Raw and SmackDown. It was the 10th annual Extreme Rules event and took place on July 15, 2018, at the PPG Paints Arena in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The theme of the event was that it featured various hardcore-based matches. The card consisted of 12 matches, including two on the Kickoff pre-show. Only three matches, including one pre-show match, were contested under a hardcore stipulation. In the main event, Dolph Ziggler retained Raw's Intercontinental Championship by defeating Seth Rollins by 5–4 in a 30-minute Iron Man match that went into sudden death overtime. This was the first time that an Intercontinental Championship match was the main event of a WWE pay-per-view since Backlash in April 2001. In the penultimate match, AJ Styles retained SmackDown's WWE Championship against Rusev. In other prominent matches, Alexa Bliss retained the Raw Women's Championship against Nia Jax in an Extreme Rules match, Bobby Lashley defeated Roman Reigns, and Shinsuke Nakamura defeated Jeff Hardy to win SmackDown's United States Championship. The event was originally planned to be held exclusively for the Raw brand, like the previous year, and it was also originally planned to be held on September 16 at the AT&T Center in San Antonio, Texas, but after April's WrestleMania 34, brand-exclusive PPV and livestreaming events for the main roster under the second brand split were discontinued. As a result, Extreme Rules was moved up to replace Battleground that was originally planned for this date and location, with Extreme Rules's original date and location given to Hell in a Cell. This also made it the first Extreme Rules since 2011 to feature multiple brands during a brand split.