This Sunday, World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) will hold its biggest show of the year, WrestleMania. The 2016 edition of WrestleMania is the 32nd such event put on by WWE, the most recognizable pro wrestling organization — or, to use WWE parlance, "sports entertainment company" — in the world, and is expected to break its own indoor attendance record with 100,000 fans packed into Dallas’s AT&T Stadium. If recent viewing patterns hold, another 1.5 to 2 million people will be watching live on Pay-Per-View and WWE’s streaming platform, the WWE Network.

Like all pro wrestling events, WrestleMania features matches with preordained outcomes. The production process is similar to that of any other form of scripted entertainment: Onscreen talent collaborates with a staff of writers to develop an ongoing story and then works with "agents" (usually former performers) to craft the major plot points and flow of the matches. But the wrestling itself is not "fake" — at Sunday’s show, WWE Superstars (the company's term for its male talent) will compete in matches featuring ladders, a 5-ton, 20-foot-tall steel cage, and a variety of other weapons. Given the stakes of performing at WWE’s self-proclaimed "Granddaddy of Them All," it’s likely someone will get hurt for real.

WrestleMania functions both as a season finale for a year’s worth of WWE storylines and a springboard for the future

Still, WrestleMania is about far more than carnage. As WWE’s seminal showcase, it offers the pomp and circumstance of the Super Bowl crossed with the Rose Bowl Parade. Every year WrestleMania gets bigger — and longer — with a week’s worth of events leading up to Sunday’s five-hour main show, all broadcast live on the WWE Network. WrestleMania is also uncommon as a narrative platform, functioning both as a season finale for a year’s worth of WWE storylines and a springboard for the future.

If you’re not a wrestling fan, you probably know WrestleMania exists but associate it with the past and names like Hulk Hogan, who helped the event reach mainstream popularity in the 1980s. Yet despite a few brief lulls, WrestleMania’s popularity never truly waned; now it’s arguably bigger and more profitable than ever.

How did WrestleMania become a significant pop culture event?

When Vince McMahon replaced his father as the head of WWF in 1982 (WWE was previously known as WWF, for World Wrestling Federation), his primary goal was to move wrestling out of its territory-based approach and toward more national prominence. (At the time, wrestling spanned several regional leagues, like the American Wrestling Association in the Great Lakes or World Class Championship Wrestling in Texas; imagine the Big 10, SEC, and ACC, but more corrupt.)

To accomplish this, McMahon signed a number of local talents (including Hogan) to exclusive contracts and expanded the company’s audience with TV shows outside of its home in the Northeast. But it was WWF’s relationship with the burgeoning cable channel MTV that truly paved the way for WrestleMania. In live specials that aired on MTV in 1984 and '85, WWF talent intermingled with A-listers like Cyndi Lauper and Andy Warhol, turning wrestlers like Hogan, "Rowdy" Roddy Piper, and Wendi Richter into household names.

Even before WWF unveiled the first WrestleMania in March 1985, it had already become a pop culture sensation; mainstream media coverage sent anticipation through the roof. But the massive success of that event — seen by more than 1 million people through closed-circuit television, a record-breaking figure — officially solidified the company as a star-friendly, forward-thinking, moneymaking machine.

The WrestleMania formula centers on long-simmering feuds punctuated by huge moments and satisfying payoffs

Between the crossovers with MTV and WrestleMania appearances by Muhammad Ali and Mr. T, WWF developed enough clout to recruit big names to subsequent supercards and sell NBC a primetime show, Saturday Night’s Main Event. Meanwhile, the demand for WrestleMania 2 helped jump-start the Pay-Per-View market that still thrives to this day. From ticket sales to a massive merchandising arm, WWF developed a multifaceted revenue stream comparable to those of the most successful sports leagues.

The early triumphs of WrestleMania peaked in 1987, where a reported 93,000 people watched Hulk Hogan bodyslam his friend turned rival Andre the Giant (of The Princess Bride fame) in Detroit’s Silverdome. Although WrestleMania 3 is thought to be the event's pinnacle, it continued to draw massive crowds through the early '90s as Hogan faced a series of wrestling icons like "Macho Man" Randy Savage, the Ultimate Warrior, and patriot turned Iraqi sympathizer Sgt. Slaughter. It was during this period that WWF solidified the WrestleMania formula: long-simmering feuds punctuated by huge moments and satisfying payoffs.

A temporary lull gave way to a second major boom in the late '90s, as edgier Superstars like "Stone Cold" Steve Austin and The Rock helped WWF score historic ratings for its weekly show, Monday Night Raw — not to mention major magazine covers and more crossover appearances on MTV and Saturday Night Live.

In this "attitude era," cartoonish "good versus evil" morality plays were replaced by unprecedented levels of violence, sex, and innuendo. The WrestleMania guest stars were edgier too: fresh-out-of-prison Mike Tyson, former Bill Clinton mistress Gennifer Flowers, disgraced Major League Baseball star Pete Rose, and nu-metal heroes Limp Bizkit. Along the way, WWF tinkered with the 'Mania formula, offering fewer but longer and more spot-heavy matches and even allowing main event "heels" (wrestling lingo for bad guys) to leave victorious.

In recent years, WWE has savvily incorporated reality into its own "reality," improving WrestleMania in the process

WrestleMania is now an institution. It’s been covered all this week by major news outlets, including live look-ins on ESPN. The spectacle WWE creates, and the number of non-wrestling stars it recruits, is astonishing and occasionally surreal.

Kim Kardashian served as a guest host in 2008, long before she was one of the most famous people in the world. As many have pointed out over the past year, Donald Trump has a longstanding relationship with the WWE, feuding in a storyline with McMahon in 2007 and joining the company’s Hall of Fame in 2013. In 2015, a wonderfully broad Russian villain named Rusev entered the arena on a tank. Later, The Rock and UFC superstar Ronda Rousey beat up Triple H and Stephanie McMahon, two members of the company’s real-life management.

It’s that blurring between scripted spectacle and reality that has morphed WrestleMania yet again, into something even better than it was in Hogan or Austin’s day. Modern WWE regularly drops the facade that wrestling is "real," through behind-the-scenes documentaries and Hall of Fame ceremonies that acknowledge the performative nature of the art form. More impressively, reality — or "reality" — now seeps into WWE storylines.

Catalyzed by a 2011 fourth-wall-breaking verbal assault by CM Punk (embedded above), performers regularly move in and out of character onscreen and on social media and pull from real-life circumstances or backstage conflicts that fans read about online as a way to generate even more of a reaction.

Modern WWE regularly drops the facade that wrestling is "real"

This shift to what ESPN’s David Shoemaker calls the "reality era" has significantly altered how WWE tells stories leading up to, and during, WrestleMania. Scripted feuds are still settled and new allegiances are still formed, but WWE is forced to work even harder to surprise or satisfy "smart" fans who know their live reaction can have an impact on storylines. For these fans — who are generally older than WWE’s target demographic of young kids and teens — the response to WrestleMania season is an annual referendum on what WWE is doing right, or more commonly, doing wrong.

Fans know that wrestling "isn’t real"; they agree to play along for the same reasons that people who read books or watch TV do so with their favorite texts: to be immersed in a world and its stories. WWE constantly tells fans that all that matters is the response in the arena (or, increasingly, on social media). You cheer, you boo, you essentially vote for who’s at the top of the card.

But in integrating "reality" into certain storylines — by using performers’ real names, their real histories outside WWE, or their real-world conflicts with one another — and leaving it out of others entirely, WWE puts itself in a precarious position. Fans can sense when certain Superstars or storylines are being pushed onto them by corporate mandate or when their response is being ignored — and increasingly, they are fighting back.

The last two WrestleManias have been defined by this struggle over control of WWE’s soul. At WrestleMania 30 in 2014, rogue fan support for perennial underdog Daniel Bryan — a small-in-stature performer who had a successful wrestling career before coming to WWE — forced the company to change its main event plans and give Bryan the championship-winning moment. A similar thing happened in 2015, when WWE positioned Roman Reigns, a very green performer with the right "look" (huge muscles, flowing locks) for a major WrestleMania storyline. He wasn’t ready. His work on the microphone, a key component of modern WWE where competitors spar verbally before duking it out physically, was severely lacking, and fans could tell. So they did the only thing they could: boo. This rejection of WWE’s latest corporate chosen one forced another swerve, with Reigns leaving the event a loser, not the Next Big Thing.

In both cases, WWE openly antagonized very vocal segments of its fan base, resulting in arena after arena full of disgruntled boos on the "Road to WrestleMania," the company’s most important period of the year. Things got so bad in early 2015 that #CancelWWENetwork was a trending hashtag on Twitter. Yet in both cases, the company weathered the outcry to ultimately give fans something they wanted.

Put another way, given that the nature of pro wrestling is to garner any response — good or bad — for as long as possible, WWE stoked the fires of fan frustration just long enough to guide those fans into openly accepting the eventual climax of the story. In 2014, outrage was written directly into the story; Bryan led a fan-oriented "Occupy" movement against the evil "Authority" until the powers that be, played onscreen by real WWE executives, had no "choice" but to let Bryan prove his merits. In 2015, WWE took a more subtle approach: Reigns was framed as a "controversial" (read: hated by half the audience) Superstar before getting physically dominated by legitimate tough guy and former UFC champion Brock Lesnar in the WrestleMania main event.

That’s the thing about WrestleMania: The story is never calcified, and it never stops. It’s a season finale, a season premiere, a sporting event, and a live elimination show all at once. Wrestling is often linked to daytime soaps as a way to delegitimize both as "low culture," but the comparison is apt; both wrestling and daytime soaps continually weave stories together, rewrite and remix their own histories, and regularly drive their fans mad with bad decisions. But there’s always the next day, the next episode, the next chance to right the wrongs.

What's in store for this year’s event?

On paper, WrestleMania 32 looks like it's going to be terrible. WWE's roster of Superstars has been wrecked by injuries. The aforementioned Bryan just retired due to lingering concussion issues, longtime stars John Cena and Randy Orton are both out with gnarly ailments, and 2015’s longest-reigning champion, Seth Rollins, tore his ACL late last fall. It’s so bad that every person who left WrestleMania 31 with a title will miss 32 with an injury. Imagine if, when the Broncos and the Panthers competed against each other in this year's Super Bowl, they'd played without Cam Newton, Von Miller, and Peyton Manning. Or imagine if your favorite TV show aired a finale without three of its five leads.

Likewise, WWE’s insistence on telling certain stories and the fans’ insistence on resisting those stories in hopes of forcing the company’s hand yet again has reached new heights. Roman Reigns is back in the main event with all indications that this year is his coronation as the champion — and the fans know that, so they’ve booed him out of the building at every televised event for three months.

WWE tried to overcome this negative response by simply keeping Reigns off TV for weeks, slotting fan favorite Dean Ambrose in the hero spot against conquering dictator and champion Triple H. It hasn’t worked. On the final episode of Monday Night Raw before WrestleMania, the "Ro-man Sucks" chants were louder than ever, while the villainous Triple H continued to garner support. Wrestling fans love to be manipulated, but have grown to rebel when they see the invisible hand of WWE management forcibly guiding them.

All signs currently point to a lackluster, talent-light WrestleMania, making it all the more likely that the event will turn out surprisingly great

WrestleMania 32’s other projected main event features the Undertaker, a 51-year-old great with his best days far behind him, facing off against Shane McMahon, Vince’s son, who was never a full-time competitor and hasn’t been with the company since 2010. Meanwhile, the two most popular performers left standing, Ambrose and former UFC champion Brock Lesnar, are paired with one another in what feels like WWE’s annual attempt to placate hardcore fans.

Nevertheless, the fact that all signs currently point to a lackluster, talent-light WrestleMania only makes it more likely that Sunday’s event will turn out surprisingly great. WWE wants it to be the biggest WrestleMania ever, and so it will be. Old guys Undertaker and Shane McMahon are certain to suffer for everyone’s cheers. Someone’s entrance will top the tank. The Rock might bring the entire cast of his Baywatch film to the ring. Trump could easily make another appearance.

Ultimately, though, WrestleMania will succeed yet again, because unlike all other forms of scripted entertainment, WWE can — and will — change its plans in real time. The lingering resentment with storylines will be front and center yet again. Fans might not get exactly what they want, but if recent history is any indication, WrestleMania will offer resolutions so magnificently crafted that they’ll seem like they were the plan all along. Superstars thought to be "held down" by the corporate machinations driving WWE in real life will create moments that fans remember forever.

Beyond the grandeur, guest stars, or orchestrated violence, it is WWE’s willingness to constantly tinker with WrestleMania and the company's complicated negotiation with its audience that makes this major event so exceptional. WrestleMania 32 should be no different.