As the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders drop into splits, The Rock emerges, flexes for the crowd, holds a “just a minute” finger to the 100,000 people gathered in AT&T Stadium, disappears for a moment, and returns to the colossal, star-shaped LED stage with a flamethrower.

The Rock shoots plumes of fire into the air a few times before deciding to set a metal sign of his name, conveniently placed nearby, aflame. The stadium quakes with atavistic joy. We have fire, a hero, his theme music—this is the stuff that myths are made of.

But this scene’s delirious blend of farce and violence, like many others at Wrestlemania, the WWE’s annual spectacular, masks painstaking corporate deliberation.

In 1999 WWE became a publicly traded company. Since then, they’ve launched a leading OTT streaming platform (the WWE Network), forged sponsorship deals with blue chip consumer brands, installed better concussion protocols than the NFL and European soccer, and added to their vertically integrated intellectual properties that stretch back to before the end of World War II.

If you haven’t batted an eye toward wrestling for a decade or three, you should know that the WWE doesn’t compete with bass fishing and monster trucks anymore. It competes with Disney and the NFL.