Royal Rumble (2015)

The 2015 Royal Rumble was a professional wrestling pay-per-view (PPV) and livestreaming event produced by WWE. It was the 28th annual Royal Rumble event and took place on January 25, 2015, at the Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, which was the second Royal Rumble event held at the venue, after 2004 when it was known as Wachovia Center. The event was based around the men's Royal Rumble match, a modified 30-man battle royal in which the participants enter at timed intervals instead of all beginning in the ring at the same time and the winner received a WWE World Heavyweight Championship match at WrestleMania 31. Six matches were contested at the event, including one on the Kickoff pre-show. The main event was the 2015 Royal Rumble match, which was won by Roman Reigns, who last eliminated Rusev. Also on the event's card, The Usos (Jey Uso and Jimmy Uso) defeated The Miz and Damien Mizdow to retain the WWE Tag Team Championship, while WWE World Heavyweight Champion Brock Lesnar successfully defended his title against Seth Rollins and John Cena in a triple threat match in the penultimate match. Like the previous year's event, the 2015 Royal Rumble was marred by a strongly negative audience reaction to the Royal Rumble match and its winner Roman Reigns. However, the WWE World Heavyweight Championship triple threat match received high praise from critics and fans. This was also the first Royal Rumble to livestream on the WWE Network, which launched in February 2014. The event received 145,000 pay-per-view buys (excluding WWE Network views), down from the previous year's 467,000 buys.