KB Busts Up Another Myth: What Killed WCW

[klunderbunker]

"The AOL/Time Warner merger killed WCW, not bad ratings or writing."

I see this constantly on here and else where and it is completely wrong. The merger didn't kill WCW. It put WCW out of its misery.

Think about this for a second and common sense will tell you why the theory about the merger killing WCW makes no sense. In short, WCW was cancelled because it stopped being a big ratings winner. Back in 1997, WCW was making millions of dollars and was so far ahead of WWF that it wasn't even funny. Bischoff will tell you all the time that he beat WWF for what, 86 or so weeks in a row? In short, they were dominating and making a ton of money.

Then things slowly began to turn around on them, with I believe the blow coming at Starrcade 97, but that's an argument for a later thread. The fans got ticked off after seeing Sting still not be able to win the title as it went to Hogan again in late April. On April 6, Raw won a night in the ratings and for all intents and purposes never looked back. In the roughly 150 battles in the Monday Night Wars after that (3 years, 50 weeks a year for the sake of a round number), WCW won a total of 9 head to head matches, or roughly 6% of the time. They didn't win for approximately two and a half years, or 125 weeks in a row (approximately) by the end of the company.

By the beginning of the year 2000, Vince Russo was running things. WWF had gone through the roof with the reign of Steve Austin and the rise of guys like The Rock and HHH to the main event. They were now a publically traded company and were thrashing WCW in the ratings week in and week out. The Radicals jumped to the WWF in January/February and soon everyone was leaving. David Arquette was made world champion, there was the Hogan/Russo "shoot" thing at Bash at the Beach and everything fell apart. If I remember correctly, at one point over a 52 week period, WCW lost over a million dollars a week on average.

Think about that for a minute. A million dollars is a lot of money. WCW was managing to lose that every 7 days for a year. Think about how bad business had been around this time. To give you an idea, in the years from 2000-2001, WCW had a total of 15 PPVs. Two of them drew over 10,000 people and only four broke 8,000. That's total people in the building and there's no telling how many of them actually paid. So let's see: the TV ratings are going down and no one is going to the PPVs or buying them plus the competition is pounding them into the ground while they're losing a million dollars a week.

But none of this killed WCW. Nope, they were FINE until that merger happened.

WCW was dead long before AOL/Time Warner pulled the plug on it. If WCW had been alive and well, why would no other network put it on TV? Because the company was finished. There was a market for wrestling. If not, why would WWF have made over 370 million dollars in 2000? The idea that it was a merger that killed WCW is absurd. It didn't even kill the TV shows. When Ripley's Believe It Or Not is drawing a higher rating than Thunder and is nipping at the heels of Nitro, it's not a merger that ends your show, not when you're bleeding money like that.

AOL/Time Warner didn't get rid of WCW programming because they didn't like wrestling. They got rid of WCW programming because WCW was dead when AOL/Time Warner took control of it. This whole concept can be gotten rid of in one simple question.

According to TVbythenumbers.com, for the week ending June 5, 2011, the top rated cable show was Pawn Stars. Barring something rather strange, is there any reason why the History Channel would stop all airings of this show? It's making money (in theory) and is the top rated show on cable. OF COURSE THEY WOULDN'T CANCEL IT! It would make no sense and the same is true of the theory that the AOL/Time Warner merger killed WCW, because it didn't. It put WCW out of its misery.

 

[Cats Pajamas]

I'm going to agree.

Ding!

KB gets the square!

Very well done, I'm glad someone cleared the air. To many folks maybe getting the wrong idea from WWEs rise and fall DVD nonsense.

 

[RJB1976]

Actually, from where I sit, WCW shot themselves in the front with the dominance of the NWO and Goldberg. Suddenyl, mid card guys who were going after titles, like Hugh Morrus and Craig "Pitbull" Pittman became nothing but jobbers. Hell, they took "Dirty" Dick Slater and Bunkhouse Buck and made them into jobbers as well, and they were up there in profile on the tag team scene.

By having these "outsiders" and a then "Unknown" coming, roughly the same time, and run roughshot over the entire roster, made WCW look weak. Not to mention how they crapped all over the cruiserweight division, by having Daffney and Medusa hold the title. The cruiserwieghts were why i tuned in to WCW, because it offered something that I wasn't getting in the WWF. High flying wrestling with international stars.

So I guess it was more of a melting pot of reasons why WCW failed, and not just one culprit, aka the AOL/Time Warner merger.

 

[RD_21]

Actually, from where I sit, WCW shot themselves in the front with the dominance of the NWO and Goldberg. Suddenyl, mid card guys who were going after titles, like Hugh Morrus and Craig "Pitbull" Pittman became nothing but jobbers. Hell, they took "Dirty" Dick Slater and Bunkhouse Buck and made them into jobbers as well, and they were up there in profile on the tag team scene.

By having these "outsiders" and a then "Unknown" coming, roughly the same time, and run roughshot over the entire roster, made WCW look weak. Not to mention how they crapped all over the cruiserweight division, by having Daffney and Medusa hold the title. The cruiserwieghts were why i tuned in to WCW, because it offered something that I wasn't getting in the WWF. High flying wrestling with international stars.

So I guess it was more of a melting pot of reasons why WCW failed, and not just one culprit, aka the AOL/Time Warner merger.

Wel what really made wCw big was Hogan, the nWo and Goldberg, that's when wCw was red hot. wCw died when they lost their mind and were changing face from heel every week. People complain about TNA but it was nothing compared to wCw. They did a sort of reboot and then 2 weeks later another reboot where the alignment of almost everyone was changed again.

If they had sold the company to Bischoff it could have been different, but wCw had lost almost all his major player by that time, when the big nWo is Jarrett and Steiner... something's wrong.

I don't think it was just one thing, it was a lot of things.

 

[ShawnBronald]

I thought this obvious. Hogan, Bischoff and Russo killed WCW way before Time Warner sold it to WWE. WCW became absolutely unwatchable. They were unable to create any stars not named "Goldberg". They went to the same well ("Hogan" and nWo) too many times and it finally dried up. Instead of building on success, they became content and allowed WWE to catch up and leave them in the dust. Simple as that.

 

[Rayne]

Bleh, I can't rep you again yet.

I've been saying exactly this for a long time, but people don't want to hear that. They want to play the poor victims, beaten back by mainstream media's distaste for professional wrestling. WCW didn't fail because ratings were down and they were going through cash like women through toilet paper; no, they failed because those big meanies at Time Warner/AOL couldn't appreciate how awesome WCW was.

 

[Bobby B]

Well, completely depends on your definition of the word killed.

If a careless driver does nothing about his bad driving habits for five years - and they gradually get worse and worse, before he finally dies in a horrific car crash - the crash was the thing that killed him, but the reason for his death was more than that.

The reason WCW died was because of bad management
But WCW was killed because they couldn't find a TV network. And without the network there was no value in it.

 

[marklouis]

Actually, you are the one who is wrong. At the end of it's run, Nitro was still getting double the ratings TNA gets now. Specifically, from a 2-3. Nitro was the highest rated show on TNT or TBS at the time. One man killed WCW: Jamie Kellner. He was the head of Turner Broadcasting at the time of the AOL/Time Warner merger, and he said that pro wrestling did not fit in with the image the company wanted to promote. This is a fact. You can look it up and find the exact quote. He wanted the "right" kind of advertisers on his networks, whatever that means. I know it's easy to dump on WCW content, and there were a lot of bad aspects to it. But there are also the facts, which are severely lacking in this thread.

 

[klunderbunker]

Actually, you are the one who is wrong. At the end of it's run, Nitro was still getting double the ratings TNA gets now. Specifically, from a 2-3. Nitro was the highest rated show on TNT or TBS at the time. One man killed WCW: Jamie Kellner. He was the head of Turner Broadcasting at the time of the AOL/Time Warner merger, and he said that pro wrestling did not fit in with the image the company wanted to promote. This is a fact. You can look it up and find the exact quote. He wanted the "right" kind of advertisers on his networks, whatever that means. I know it's easy to dump on WCW content, and there were a lot of bad aspects to it. But there are also the facts, which are severely lacking in this thread.

So, if one network didn't think it was right, the head of said network must have been considered the smartest man in TV because no one else picked it up, which is also fact. The company sold for 4.2 million dollars to Vince McMahon. That's not exactly worth a ton of money. Also at this point WWF was making a fortune so therefore wrestling had a market at this point. But it was one network that killed it. You my friend, are a mindless fool.

 

[FoleyIsGod]

Just read The Death of WCW by RD Reynolds and Bryan Alverez sometime, says pretty much what you have just said, yet it was published in 2005...

Methinks the myths were long ago busted!

 

[klunderbunker]

Just read The Death of WCW by RD Reynolds and Bryan Alverez sometime, says pretty much what you have just said, yet it was published in 2005...

Methinks the myths were long ago busted!

Read it already. Still see people around here blaming Kellner because they don't want to simply admit that WCW sucked at the end and Russo and Bischoff and various other factors killed it. Instead they want to blame one single person making a single decision for it, because they don't want to just say "gee, maybe we were wrong about this." Then we still get people saying "it was all Kellner and NOTHING else." Makes me shake my head.

 

[H33LTurn]

Its hard to say that, well to paraphrase what you said, WCW killed itself. Key talent in the complany was leaving and the a new management was in place. WCW was going through a transitional period and its hard to say if they would've stayed in that slump or found something to bring themselves back up. WWF went through a slump after Hogan left and the whole rock and wrestling era was over. They rose up with the Attitude era, that didnt take full force until years after WWF's biggest draw, Hogan, was out of the company. Literraly speaking, the AOL/Time Warner merger DID kill WCW, because it literrally pulled the plug on the show.

 

[dcarson108]

You my friend, are a mindless fool.

Where is your evidence? It's a fact Nitro was still in the 2.0 in ratings. It's a fact Nitro was still one of the most watched shows on the Network. I'm not saying you're rong, you're just throwing out rhetoric and insults.

I think it's a two way street. Yes WCW was still getting ratings, but their viewership was basically cut in half in two years. From what I read, house show attendance was dreadful and PPV buys weren't stellar either. Let's not get into locker room morale either.

You can blame WCW management for the decline. That's obvious. But the company wasn't dead. It was still making enough money (and Turner can obviously fund anything he wants) but changes need to be made. If I had to throw something out there, I'd say the AOL/Time Warner weren't huge wrestling fans and because the company was struggling, it gave them the excuse to pull the plug.

If TNA is surviving in its present state, WCW certainly could have survived a few more years. It just would have taken time and another overhaul in management. I just think the guys in charge weren't willing to do put the effort into fixing it.

 

[finoj05]

So, if one network didn't think it was right, the head of said network must have been considered the smartest man in TV because no one else picked it up, which is also fact. The company sold for 4.2 million dollars to Vince McMahon. That's not exactly worth a ton of money. Also at this point WWF was making a fortune so therefore wrestling had a market at this point. But it was one network that killed it. You my friend, are a mindless fool.

WCW selling for 4.2 million dollars does not mean it was actually worth 4.2 million dollars.

The merger of Warner Brothers and Turner, and then eventually AOL ( this book gives a lot of insight http://www.amazon.com/Stealing-Time-Steve-Collapse-Warner/dp/0743247868 ) grew the company to become so large that the executive infrastructure changed to become completely profit-driven with board rooms full of people who only cared about the bottom line and not about growth or expansion.

The AOL/Time Warner merger is a known disaster. It was a failure because a company who was 'worth' more at the time (AOL) bought a company that had ACTUAL assets and revenue streams that didn't rely on the internet bubble of the 1990's. Because of this, the management changed and was replaced with people who had no history in the company. Decisions were being made that were in the interest of the shareholders and not the company.

Jamie Kellner cancelled WCW programming without really giving Fuscient/Bischoff any real long-term notice to find a new network. It was not part of the deal that WCW will have to find a new home. WWE had rights (due to a prior lawsuit) to bid on WCW first if it ever went up for sale (they declined in 2000) and thus, without the network problems with Viacom, they were able to purchase WCW at a price that was pretty much a steal because the people at Time Warner didn't realize how much it was actually worth (or, a popular conspiracy theory, Vince had former employees on the inside of Turner that got him the deal and/or convinced Jamie Kellner to cancel the programming).

The AOL/Time Warner merger also directly caused WCW to be over-saturated in the late 1990's (because they wanted to maximize profits) which led to the introduction of Thunder. The ways in which the merger effected WCW is much more numerous that most of us can begin to understand. Anyone that actually was working at WCW at the time can tell you that.

A network cancelling it's highest rated show on the network is unheard of. TNT has not recovered since then. Just because another network didn't pick up the contract does not mean it wasn't worth anything. If WWE was cancelled tomorrow without notice, it would probably take time for them to find a new home as well. People would also laugh at USA for being so stupid. WCW Nitro was getting ratings comparable to RAW today.

 

[klunderbunker]

Where is your evidence? It's a fact Nitro was still in the 2.0 in ratings. It's a fact Nitro was still one of the most watched shows on the Network. I'm not saying you're rong, you're just throwing out rhetoric and insults.

I think it's a two way street. Yes WCW was still getting ratings, but their viewership was basically cut in half in two years. From what I read, house show attendance was dreadful and PPV buys weren't stellar either. Let's not get into locker room morale either.

You can blame WCW management for the decline. That's obvious. But the company wasn't dead. It was still making enough money (and Turner can obviously fund anything he wants) but changes need to be made. If I had to throw something out there, I'd say the AOL/Time Warner weren't huge wrestling fans and because the company was struggling, it gave them the excuse to pull the plug.

If TNA is surviving in its present state, WCW certainly could have survived a few more years. It just would have taken time and another overhaul in management. I just think the guys in charge weren't willing to do put the effort into fixing it.

So let me make sure I get this straight.

It's ok for a business to have its viewership get cut in half, meaning half as many people watch the show and see the ads while losing seven figures a week because it means things are still strong? In what world is losing a million bucks a week considered strong? It wasn't making money. It was losing it hand over fist. TNA is not WCW by a long shot. If you think ratings are all that matters, you are indeed the fool I referred to you as.

 

[klunderbunker]

WCW selling for 4.2 million dollars does not mean it was actually worth 4.2 million dollars.

The merger of Warner Brothers and Turner, and then eventually AOL ( this book gives a lot of insight http://www.amazon.com/Stealing-Time-Steve-Collapse-Warner/dp/0743247868 ) grew the company to become so large that the executive infrastructure changed to become completely profit-driven with board rooms full of people who only cared about the bottom line and not about growth or expansion.

The AOL/Time Warner merger is a known disaster. It was a failure because a company who was 'worth' more at the time (AOL) bought a company that had ACTUAL assets and revenue streams that didn't rely on the internet bubble of the 1990's. Because of this, the management changed and was replaced with people who had no history in the company. Decisions were being made that were in the interest of the shareholders and not the company.

Jamie Kellner cancelled WCW programming without really giving Fuscient/Bischoff any real long-term notice to find a new network. It was not part of the deal that WCW will have to find a new home. WWE had rights (due to a prior lawsuit) to bid on WCW first if it ever went up for sale (they declined in 2000) and thus, without the network problems with Viacom, they were able to purchase WCW at a price that was pretty much a steal because the people at Time Warner didn't realize how much it was actually worth (or, a popular conspiracy theory, Vince had former employees on the inside of Turner that got him the deal and/or convinced Jamie Kellner to cancel the programming).

The AOL/Time Warner merger also directly caused WCW to be over-saturated in the late 1990's (because they wanted to maximize profits) which led to the introduction of Thunder. The ways in which the merger effected WCW is much more numerous that most of us can begin to understand. Anyone that actually was working at WCW at the time can tell you that.

And again we get the whole "it was WCW's fault! it was something else entirely!"

Tell me this: do you honestly believe that if WCW was even breaking even, do you think it would have been cancelled? If so, you lack common sense. What you're saying is that a company didn't look at numbers, didn't look at figures or long term anything and simply said "ah wrestling. Yeah that's gone." That makes zero sense, namely due to the other wrestling company making money while the others went under. WWF was a success, WCW was a failure, and it wasn't because of the merger, period.

 

[Aaron]

I don't think any one person killed WCW, per se. It was really a group effort to create a horrible product that no one wanted to see anymore.

But, if you're looking to put the blame on one person, it was Vince McMahon. Bowing to pressure from his investors, he decided not to make WCW it's own entity under the WWF/E banner and pretty much put the bullet in its head after the InVasion angle was done.

Granted, at that point it was nothing more than taking it off life support.

 

[sting4life]

So, if one network didn't think it was right, the head of said network must have been considered the smartest man in TV because no one else picked it up, which is also fact. The company sold for 4.2 million dollars to Vince McMahon. That's not exactly worth a ton of money. Also at this point WWF was making a fortune so therefore wrestling had a market at this point. But it was one network that killed it. You my friend, are a mindless fool.

Why would another network buy WCW when all the "big" names like Sting, Flair, and Hogan had guarenteed contracts. All you would be getting would be a bunch of jobbers and have to hope that after a year the "stars" would want to wrestle for WCW again.

Saying that the wrestling sucked is what caused WCW to end is just dumb. If that was the case then the WWF(E) would of folded years ago and according to Vince himself it almost did. The reason it didn't was it because of Vince not wanting to give in and he still had the backing of the network.

Even before the merger there were some higher ups in Turner that weren't too fond of wrestling and the merger sealed the deal when those idiots at AOL thought it would be better to get rid of wrestling that was still getting decent enough ratings and replace it will all day marathons of Dirty Dancing and other movies that have been seen hundreds of times and get .05 ratings.

 

[finoj05]

So let me make sure I get this straight.

It's ok for a business to have its viewership get cut in half, meaning half as many people watch the show and see the ads while losing seven figures a week because it means things are still strong? In what world is losing a million bucks a week considered strong? It wasn't making money. It was losing it hand over fist. TNA is not WCW by a long shot. If you think ratings are all that matters, you are indeed the fool I referred to you as.

But it WAS all that mattered. Fuscient/Bischoff was buying everything. ALL of the talent contracts, the tape library and the entire infrastructure. TNT/TBS would air Nitro and Thunder, WCW would pay for itself and lose money on it's own. The money they had lost wouldn't matter anymore. They were willing to pay over 20 million dollars for WCW (still a bargain price) which included taking all the hefty talent contracts of Goldberg, Kevin Nash, Scott Steiner, Ric Flair, Sting and many of the other top talents that AOL/TW still had to pay for after WWE bought it.

So thus, all that mattered was the ratings and WCW was still delivering better ratings than any other show on TNT or TBS. Cancelling them made little sense.

 

[MrHashasheen]

The AOL/Time Warner merger also directly caused WCW to be over-saturated in the late 1990's (because they wanted to maximize profits) which led to the introduction of Thunder. The ways in which the merger effected WCW is much more numerous that most of us can begin to understand. Anyone that actually was working at WCW at the time can tell you that.

Thunder was created because Ted Turner wanted it done. I think that it's in Bischoff's memoirs and why they went to three hours on Nitro, to get additional advertising money to fund it.

Anyway, klunder, I'm also one to disagree with your opinion. While WCW was near-crap at the end of it's run, it still had decent ratings, which is what the television network would care about, not house-shows or PPV buy-rates (which were dismal since 2000 if I remember correctly). Add to that the fact that WCW was undersold and Kellner's known opinions on wrestling programming (among the other stupid shit he's said and done), I can't accept your "myth-busting'.

As to why no other network picked it up, I'm pretty sure you can't just pick up programs in the middle of television seasons. If I'm wrong, someone can feel free to correct me on it.

 

[FunKay the Inevitable]

I'm not seeing how the ultimate demise of WCW can't be attributed to the product. The money in was far less than it had been in the company’s best year of 1997. They were putting more money out than they were taking in. The house shows, TV shows and even the PPV's were not anywhere near capacity. The ratings were far lower than they had been in previous years, basically halving in the space of 18 months. This isn't even to mention how terrible the booking was. The company was a sinking ship. Time Warner & AOL simply had the brains to jump before they sank. The company was getting massacred every single time they went up against the WWF. The writing was on the wall and the TV executives knew it.

 

[The Crock]

The product was absolutely terrible. That in turn, made ratings shit, so WCW started losing money. Sounds simple to me. People use the Time Warner/AOL merger as a cop-out, honestly. Nothing could have saved WCW at that point. No network wanted to take on a product that was losing that much money or a product that was losing viewership weekly. Nobody could bail out WCW, they buried themselves into a deep, deep hole. No merger buried them, if anything that could have saved them, if they had even tried to improve the product, but they didn't. They were so intent on using recycled WWF angles, just speeding them up x10, that nobody wanted to watch anymore. They killed themselves. Period.

 

[finoj05]

And again we get the whole "it was WCW's fault! it was something else entirely!"

Tell me this: do you honestly believe that if WCW was even breaking even, do you think it would have been cancelled? If so, you lack common sense. What you're saying is that a company didn't look at numbers, didn't look at figures or long term anything and simply said "ah wrestling. Yeah that's gone." That makes zero sense, namely due to the other wrestling company making money while the others went under. WWF was a success, WCW was a failure, and it wasn't because of the merger, period.

I think you are missing the point. AOL/TW was selling WCW to Fuscient Media ventures. Whether the company made money was no longer a problem. Under the deal they were finalizing, AOL/TW would no longer being paying for WCW. Thus, they would get the programming of Nitro/Thunder, but they would no longer have to pay for it. WCW losing money is why they were selling it, not why it was cancelled. Two different things.

As to why no other network picked it up, I'm pretty sure you can't just pick up programs in the middle of television seasons. If I'm wrong, someone can feel free to correct me on it.

It's possible but unlikely. Fuscient's deal was in-place and the time slots were part of the deal. It screwed up the deal so much, the buyers threw up their hands because the 6 months of work was now useless. WWE had first rights to buy the company, so they did. End of story. It would have taken MONTHS for WCW to find a new home and for AOL/TW to alter the deal with Fuscient to purchase the company. It had nothing to do with the fact FX, USA or another major cable network did or didn't want them. Nitro was cancelled and Vince bought it within a 2-week period. There wasn't enough time for a network to properly evaluate the show's potential.

The fact that WWE hasn't found a home for NXT or Superstars (in the US) should tell you its not as simple as "You got high ratings, here's a network!" This stuff takes time to negotiate and evaluate potential programming options.

 

[LegendK1ller]

Didn't Eric Bischoff's book "Controversy Create Cash" basically states that the board members from Aol Time Warner hated wrestling? I hope you're not just stating bull shit to state bull shit. Where do you come up with all of these figures? I want to see your sources first, so that I can even believe anything you say. Until you show me your sources, I can't believe you. Especially when Bischoff states in his book that Aol Time Warner was basically the killer of WCW.

I do agree with you on one thing, Thunder was a piece of shit. Eric Bischoff also stated that in his book as well and it should have never been done.

 

[Ralf E. Chubbs]

Without shitty management, the WCW would have been thriving when AOL/TW picked up TNT. Methinks had WCW been doing well, AOL/TW would have sung a different tune regarding the WCW.

My point is this- Which came first: the Chicken or the Egg?

You can point your finger at both entities (WCW, AOL/TW) all you want, but you'd never win an argument for one without being honest with yourself regarding the other.

What's done is done.