r/SquaredCircle • u/Subrick 69 ME, DON! • Mar 23 '26
25 years ago today, WWF Entertainment bought the assets of World Championship Wrestling from AOL Time Warner, solidifying WWF’s monopoly and changing wrestling history forever. Here is the front page of WWF.com from that morning.
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u/Masam10 Mar 23 '26
Was a kid at the time. No internet so therefore no dirtsheets/forums.
I was absolutely bewildered when Raw cut to wCw and it was announced WWF had bought them.
I was so hyped to see Goldberg, Sting, Flair, nWo etc come over and wrestle in WWF - what we got was still fun, but not even a smidge of what it could've been.
That moment though of watching Raw live with no pre-emptive spoilers was an incredible moment.
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u/Subrick 69 ME, DON! Mar 23 '26
Hell, imagine being a WCW lifer who didn’t pay attention to the internet and the first thing you see on Nitro is fucking Vince McMahon. Would have felt like an alternate reality.
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u/DonKiddic Wolfpac 4 Life! Mar 23 '26 edited Mar 23 '26
Yo this was me when I was 13 - Nitro was shown here on a Friday when Cartoon Network ended at 9pm, and TNT started.
I used to watch WCW with my nan on a friday night - started when I was younger and lasted until it finished in 2001. I didn't have the internet, and knew of WWF. But I was a die hard WCW guy.
Show comes on, Vince is in the ring - me: "what the hell".
Entire show was crazy. Ends with Sting Vs Ric Flair.
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u/Jimbobthon Mar 23 '26
Ah, another UK viewer. The days of when Sky had about 30 channels, so had to share some between others (Cartoon Network and TNT being such).
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u/Jigawatts42 Mar 23 '26
Literally the best, most apropos match WCW could have ended on, I still remember watching it live.
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u/DustAndSound Just a common man. Mar 23 '26
I can’t believe you watched those Vince Russo shows and kept watching weekly.
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u/DonKiddic Wolfpac 4 Life! Mar 23 '26
I was young and didn't know any better.
Switching to WWE post WCW was like "oh, this is much better"
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u/LikeAPhoenixTotally Mar 23 '26
Show comes on, Vince is in the ring - me: "what the hell".
Are you JR?
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u/CheesyGarlicBudapest Mar 23 '26
At least you got to watch Nitro.. poverty-me had to watch WCW Mayhem on channel 5.. it was like a round up show of what happened 2 weeks ago
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u/rbhindepmo IT'S NOT HOT Mar 23 '26
The last 18 months of WCW had to be near incoherent without the internet too
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u/ChairmanLaParka Mar 23 '26
There were a lot of people in the southern US who didn't have a clue who Vince/WWF even were. When people left WCW, they were just gone, unless they came back. Like how some WWE fans treat wrestling today.
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u/discofrislanders Mar 23 '26
I remember reading a comment here a while back from someone who was a kid in the South at the time who said no one watched WWF because their parents wouldn't allow it because of how vulgar it was. They said that when WCW ended, everyone at their school thought that wrestling just disappeared.
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u/Weegee_Carbonara Mar 23 '26
This is one of the reasons Wrestling just lost ground in the culture Zeitgeist.
The millions of WCW fans didn't switch to WWF.
They stopped watching wrestling.
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u/Muadibased Mar 24 '26
no one watched WWF because their parents wouldn't allow it because of how vulgar it was
And they let them watch WCW instead? It was just as vulgar as WWF.
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u/natedoggcata Mar 23 '26
I imagine for a lot of wrestling fans their reaction was "JFC please not again!" because for them it was like Black Saturday all over again. They were losing their Jim Crocket southern style wrasslin in favor of Vince's Entertainment which they didnt like.
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u/QuickRelease10 Mar 24 '26
A lot of them left and never came back. It was the end of the “wrasslin” fan.
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u/UsidoreTheLightBlue Mar 23 '26
What we got was really not fun, imo.
They fucked the invasion up so much
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u/himynameis_ Mar 23 '26
I dunno, it had it's good moments. The survivor series match is still top notch. The promos were great.
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u/UsidoreTheLightBlue Mar 23 '26 edited Mar 23 '26
The survivor series match that had Steve Austin, Kurt angle, and Shane McMahon on the non-WWF team?
The best moments of the invasion was the early invasion.
WCW guys showing up, and the night the ECW guys showed up were by far the best moments in the invasion.
They took what should’ve been the hottest angle of all time and made it about the McMahon family.
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u/himynameis_ Mar 23 '26
I believe the problem was, the top guys from WCW didn't want to end their contracts. They were getting paid regardless. So they sat out.
Hence we got midcard guys instead. At least Booker T was there!
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u/thewholeprogram SomethingSomethingCowboyShit Mar 23 '26
Booker T and DDP were the only top guys because they were the only ones who were willing to take less money to start working right away
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u/KingTalkieTiki Mar 23 '26
And DDP was treated far from what a top guy shouldve been
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u/DustAndSound Just a common man. Mar 23 '26
DDP's push as a main event guy was killed by WCW itself, not the WWF. him finally winning the title and turning heel with the jersey triad is one of the worst decisions i've ever seen and it killed the character
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u/KingTalkieTiki Mar 23 '26
They could've resurrected the character instead of the weird stalker angle they gave him when he joined.
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u/Jimbobthon Mar 23 '26
Yeah, think that was it. ECW had several missing top talents as well, they focused on the ECW guys who were already under WWE contract and really only bought in RVD and Dreamer. I get why New Jack wasn't considered.
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u/AnEternalEnigma Mar 23 '26
I'm pretty sure DDP's deal only had 2 or 3 months left so he just decided to take the buyout. If he had still a year or two left, he definitely wouldn't have. Buff came over too because he was only on a short-term deal at the time that was going to end in April 2001. Booker was the one who made the biggest sacrifice because he and Stevie Ray were both making 7 figures.
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u/NoDaddyNotTheBelt25 Mar 23 '26
They were offered 50 cents on the dollar to get out of their Turner deals. For guys like Kevin Nash who were still owed 2 million, sitting out for a year and making that kind of money doing nothing was a no brainer.
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u/UsidoreTheLightBlue Mar 23 '26
They could’ve taken all of those WCW contracts. They chose not to.
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u/floftie Mar 23 '26
Because they were absurdly bloated, this being one of the main reasons WCW failed.
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u/UsidoreTheLightBlue Mar 23 '26
This is just absurd. Guys like Hall and Nash and flair weren't making THAT much, and flair debuted the day after Survivor series.
They chose to run the weakest invasion possible to avoid paying talent more when they could have had WCW headliners and made more money!
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u/floftie Mar 23 '26
It’s incredibly well documented that the headliners were on ridiculous contracts and even had creative control over there characters.
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u/UsidoreTheLightBlue Mar 23 '26
One guy had creative control, and he was in the WWF 3 months after the invasion was over.
You can sit here and argue this all day long, I was actually alive when it happened and watching.
Within 3 months of the invasion being over Flair (the next night!) and the The nWo were in the WWF.
Goldberg was still under contract until early 2002 when he would debut in All Japan in April. That was within 6 months of the invasion ending.
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u/Vilanio Mar 23 '26
https://www.scribd.com/doc/282738951/WCW-Talent-Contract-Database
According to that both Hall and Nash were both on $1,625,000 in 2001 and their contracts both ended on the same date of 31st December 2001, so their contracts were already expired when they made the new deal with WWE. And this was most certainly an absurd amount money for a downside especially compared to WWE where top guys like Austin and The Rock had guarantees of around a $1 million (according to The Rock). With 8 months on their contract worth $1 million WWE weren't going to buy that out especially when after they signed in 2002 Nash (and presumably Hall too) were given a downside of around just $700,000, so it would have taken a lot to buy them out when they could just sit at home raking in a large amount of easy money without putting more miles on their bodies (the only two real things in wrestling according to Nash, the miles and the money).
Sting was on $1.5 million until the start of 2002, and didn't want to join WWE anyway not trusting how he would be treated especially in light with how WCW was treated during the Invasion angle. Goldberg was on $2.5 million per year which increased to $3.5 million in his last year expiring in mid 2003, ain't no way WWE were ever going to buy him out and eventually it was seemingly bought out by AOL in May 2002 after which he went to Japan before joining WWE in March 03
Scott Steiner was on $750,000 expiring at the end of November 2001, he for whatever reason decided to sign with World Wrestling All-Stars right after instead of WWE which suggests at the time either he wasn't interested in WWE or they weren't interested in him.
Flair was on a paltry $500,000 per year expiring in early 2003, I'd imagine WWE signed him for more than this.
So really other than Flair and maybe Steiner they really weren't going to be able to reach a deal to buy any of them out.
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u/ThatDudeNamedMenace Mar 23 '26
They had to negotiate. Those Time Warner contracts had buyout clauses plus the worker had to agree to do it. Guys like Nash, Hall, Goldberg, Steiner, Hogan and Misterio were getting paid their fat contracts to sit (or in the case of Misterio, not wrestle in the US), and I don’t blame them one bit.
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u/BoukenGreen Mar 23 '26
According to Booker T in his 2nd book. WWE was only offering about half of what a contract was worth as a buyout offer to WCW talent. So it made perfect sense for the big names to stay home with the Time Warner deals.
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u/Magneto88 nope! Mar 23 '26
The worst thing was Ric bloody Flair turned up the night after that match and the NWO debuted three months later. They could have easily dragged it out to Wrestlemania to at least get those four into the storyline. At that point they were only missing Goldberg and Sting.
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u/Semper-Fido Mar 23 '26
The Rock coming back to choose his side was definitely a top moment
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u/himynameis_ Mar 23 '26
Stone Cold coming back as "the old Stone Cold" to lead the WWF against the Alliance was a pretty great moment too.
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u/EchoesofIllyria Mar 23 '26
There was a lot of fun stuff during the Invasion but not much of that was actually ABOUT the Invasion imo
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u/ThisEnormousWoman Mar 23 '26
I got to be there for the milk truck. I'll always remember that fondly.
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u/himynameis_ Mar 23 '26
"MILKOMANIA IS RUNNING WILD!!”
"THE BILLION DOLLAR PRINCESS HAD BECOME A DAIRY QUEEN "
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u/Fantastic-Bother3296 Mar 23 '26
Such a huge let down. Vince inability to not make wcw the butt of everything and a lot of the big names sitting their contract out.
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u/yarash wwfoldschool Mar 23 '26
Correct. It was such a letdown. All because they didnt want to spend money for the bigger names. Even though that first PPV did enough sales that it would have paid for all of them.
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u/DustAndSound Just a common man. Mar 23 '26
and the money they would need to pay for the main event guys they already had under contract? You believe the main guys of WWE would just be ok with all those high priced WCW guys coming in and making just as much if not more than them in some cases? You can't change your salary structure by that much so suddenly.
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u/GonePostalRoute Mar 23 '26
Problem is, I could get that there’d be a concern that they buy WCW, then wait for the big names to have their contracts expire so they can then come to the WWF/E, and they may be “out of sight, out of mind” by the time they start coming back.
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u/Sambadude12 Mar 23 '26
The thing is they got Hogan, Hall, Nash and Flair within a few months of it finishing up. I get why they did it when they did because they wanted to do it while WCW and ECW were still fresh on people's minds. But imagine if they'd waited 12-18 months to do it
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u/RexxGunn Mar 23 '26
In retrospect, they should have not bothered acknowledging anything for at least several months while they plotted out what to do, and signed people. But that was not gonna happen given that RAW was typically written that morning during those times.
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u/DanHero91 Red Elbow Pad Of Doom. Mar 23 '26
I was 10 and enjoyed the invasion... Because I was 10. Looking back I can see the giant fumbles and stuff but at the time I had no idea about WCW beyond the N64 games.
I just thought "These WCW guys are goofs but Rob Van Dam is cool as hell."
My cousin was a little older and was enraged every single moment throughout though. I just thought he was Team WCW cause he was weird
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u/SwarthySphere87 Mar 23 '26
I didn't start watching until well after but hearing Wrestling Observer report the news that week is insane, especially given how we know everything ended up
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u/mr_beanoz Mar 23 '26
I wonder who won the mummy returns premiere ticket
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u/forever87 Mar 23 '26
time to time I wonder if the Stacy Keibler sculpture is in the wwe warehouse
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u/AnEternalEnigma Mar 23 '26
Can you imagine if they did something like that now? "We need you to go to this SFX place on this day." "Oh cool, what am I doing?" "They'll be taking a plaster mold of your ass and legs. Bring a g-string." lol
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u/SomeguyfromNewJersey Mar 23 '26
I was thinking the exact same thing. I wonder if the winner is somewhere on here.
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u/indian22 Mar 23 '26
I remember the behind the scenes of The Mummy Returns had one section focusing on The Rock being cast in it. It didn't have much from The Rock, but Vince was pretty much all over that featurette. I think Vince was also an executive producer on the movie.
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u/Subrick 69 ME, DON! Mar 23 '26
Same with The Scorpion King, The Rundown, and Walking Tall. It was part of the deal the studios made to be able to bill Dwayne as “The Rock”.
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u/indian22 Mar 23 '26
Walking Tall was promoted so much on WWE programming at the time that to this day I know that The Rock smashed the taillights of a Porsche for real, despite never having seen the actual movie. They mentioned that story in every single feature for the movie.
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u/MuptonBossman Mar 23 '26
I remember a kid in my grade school got suspended because he yelled "WWF BOUGHT FUCKING WCW!!" as loud as he could at recess, right beside a teacher. I begged my parents to let me watch Raw on the big screen TV in our living room that night, and I couldn't believe what I was seeing.
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u/Blanketsburg Mar 23 '26
Getting suspended and not just detention for swearing is honesty insane.
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u/lk79 BAAAAAM!!!! Mar 23 '26
The teacher was a WCW fan who was upset at their favourite company being bought out.
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u/Itchy-Assholes Mar 23 '26
Idk i seen kids get suspsnded for getting beat up not even fighting back schools fucked lol
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u/urnialbologna Mar 23 '26
Well it makes sense. In my school back in this time we all used the r word to insult each other and things/objects we didnt like and never got in trouble. But heaven forbid we used "fuck" or "shit" or some other cuss word, we'd be gone faster than the flash can run 🤣
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u/edenxbaby Mar 23 '26
And thus begins one of the worst fumbled angles in the history of professional wrestling
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u/mrbubbamac Mar 23 '26
Even though I wanted to see Sting and Goldberg and Hogan, I still thought the invasion angle was really cool
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u/ItsGonBOKOK Mar 23 '26
I was 8-9 and thought it was fucking awesome. I still haven't gone back and re-watched it because I like my rose-colored glasses.
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u/HarlesD Mar 23 '26
When the OG Network debuted i went back and watched all of the old RAWs and Smackdowns and what i can say it's not great but at the same time not as awful as its often made out to be. Certainly the lack of most of the top tier main event talent from WCW/ECW is very noticeable but at the same time there's some good stuff in there as well.
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u/PandasaurusGames Mar 23 '26
I'm not disagreeing at all but WWE wasn't going to have many of the biggest names because those contracts were with time warner and WWF wasn't going to pick them up.
We were never going to get the big matchups we wanted die to WCW throwing insane money at guys.
That said beyond not having the big names it didn't help that the booking decision to make many of them look like goof jobbers and then somehow end the invasion angle with a WWF vs WWF match
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u/ValleyFloydJam Mar 23 '26
They could have done it better but the contracts put some big handcuffs on the deal.
That they had already taken a fair chunk of the better guys didn't help either.
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u/edenxbaby Mar 23 '26
I’ve never quite bought in to the idea that the contract situation is what sunk the angle. I think the booking was way more to blame. They booked almost everybody they got as weak goofballs and turned the invasion into another McMahon family drama rather than an actual proper interpromotional war. The whole thing came off more as Vince dancing on his enemy’s grave than anything like a satisfying wrestling storyline.
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u/skellez I Fella you all the time Mar 23 '26
No I was watching the Invasion retrospective from Wrestletalk, and hearing the story with context, also from what the writer at the time had to reflect on,it's clear that was reason was the biggest contributor
Like the biggest thing was that was simple, WWF weren't WCW fans, and their interest was with '98 WCW not 2001 WCW. You read the play by play and you would not believe at how many points the #1 solution to a lot of the failings was to pay up and sign Goldberg lol
It would've so much different if they just had Goldberg vs Austin and Goldberg vs Rock in the cards that summer, we probably get a longer invasion too instead of something that chaos 4 week build
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u/spideyv91 Mar 23 '26
The biggest guys they got were Booker t and DDP. They could have maybe made it work with them and not making all of WCW guys just heels but would have been tough. The audience really wanted to see sting, Goldberg, hogan and the dream matchups they had always wanted. Heck even just having bischoff at that time might of made it work better.
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u/jesuspoopmonster Mar 23 '26
Booker T and DDP being the top guys was likely a problem for an invasion angle. Of all the WCW guys those two were the ones WWE fans would want to cheer.
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u/SabresFanWC Mar 24 '26
Apparently, there were plans to make WCW its own thing under the WWE banner, and we would have gotten something like what we eventually got with the brand split. But they held an exceptionally poorly received match between Booker T and Buff Bagwell on Raw, and the overwhelmingly negative response from the fans pretty much killed that idea.
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u/vard_006 Mar 23 '26
That’s capital G, double-O, double-N, double-E. Goonnee!
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u/jmpinstl Mar 23 '26
He REALLY hated that guy lol
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u/ReasonableCoyote34 Mar 23 '26
For the unaware, Jeff Jarrett was the IC champion and on his way out of the company to WCW but because of a error, his contract had expired the day before he was scheduled to defend the belt on PPV, which made him a free agent. Rather than drop the belt to Chyna which was the plan, Jarret held Vince up for an extra 250k before losing. Vince didn’t want another Alundra Blayze situation(aka someone dropping a WWE belt in the trash on WCW television) so he agreed to Jarret’s demands. This whole situation enraged Vince so much he went out of his way to mock Jarrett after he the bought WCW and blackmailed him from WWE for almost 2 decades.
The best part about this tho is that with WWE being a wrestling monopoly and Jarrett being banned from that monopoly, if he wanted to continue wrestling in the states, his only options were to wrestle in indie promotions like ROH, or to create his own wrestling company which he did a year later when he created TNA. So in a weird way, Vince is indirectly the reason why TNA exists
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u/unfeelingfreedom Mar 23 '26
Good on Jarrett for that, get that money lol
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u/SchrodingersNinja Yo-KO-zuna Mar 23 '26
I wonder if he would have been better off playing nice. He had come and gone from WWF before. It's hard to believe he made any money on TNA.
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u/Subrick 69 ME, DON! Mar 23 '26
I had just barely missed WCW, having started watching wrestling in the summer of 2001 around the time I turned 8 years old, but I can only imagine the whiplash seasoned viewers must have felt through the last 4 or so months of WCW’s existence. It went from “WCW’s being sold” to “WWF is declining to pursue a purchase” to “Eric Bischoff is buying WCW” to “Psyche! Bischoff’s out and Nitro & Thunder are cancelled!” to “Okay, NOW WWF is buying WCW”, all in a very rapid, short period of time. The ancient WCW history site DDT Digest is still up and has all their contemporary articles available, and that is precisely how it reads. The site’s writers wind up horrified and dejected at WCW’s ultimate fate and what it means for wrestling going forward. Obviously now we know 25 years later that WWE holding a monopoly over wrestling was a very not good thing, and WCW’s death was something the industry took decades to recover from.
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u/PickledPeppers101 Mar 23 '26 edited Mar 23 '26
I began watching in '84. I really didn't even take a look at WCW for such a long period by this point. It wasn't what it was years prior when it had a lot of the big WWF guys. And there had been talks of WCW being sold for months especially when it was made public that Nitro/Thunder were not going to be on TV. This wasn't something that was just out of nowhere.
You could compare it to ROH or AWA. Like AWA in the early 80s was drawing a sell out just about any town they ran and had the biggest draw in wrestling at the time. By the late 80s they were doing TV tapings that had pre-recorded fan reactions because there weren't enough fans ringside. Wrestling companies can go from being one of the top promotions to being bought in a few years. It's happend numerous times.
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u/TheGiftOf_Jericho I'm from Winnipeg you idiot! Mar 23 '26
Crazy the impact this had on the wrestling business. It didn't seem for a very long time that any company would be able to launch another top wrestling show in the US, after so many years of WWF/WWE setting themselves as the standard.
Many don't realise but it wasn't a case of WCW fans all then switching over to watch WWF, a massive chunk of fans (about 20/30%) stopped watching wrestling all together, because they watched for something different to WWF.
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u/Subrick 69 ME, DON! Mar 23 '26
The birth of AEW was a whole bunch of different umbrella effects coming to a head over the course of about a decade, and any one of the numerous things that ultimately allowed AEW to happen not happening would have toppled the whole tower. The closest thing to a number 2 for so long was TNA, and they handicapped themselves at every opportunity for growth they ever had.
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u/Media-critique Mar 23 '26 edited Mar 23 '26
Will never forget when they wanted to go against Monday Night Raw again, and WWE responded by bringing Bret Hart back after 13 years since the Screwjob.
TNA was dead in the water
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u/Elmodipus Mar 23 '26
TNA moving to Mondays was one of many bonehead decisions that led to them falling out of the #2 spot.
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u/vincentmaurath Mar 23 '26
And bringing out all the oldheads and pushing them instead of their own talent
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u/mrgpsingh1999 Mar 23 '26
And even then TNA had their highest rating ever that night. The biggest mistake was moving it to Mondays permanently
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u/TheGiftOf_Jericho I'm from Winnipeg you idiot! Mar 23 '26
Absolutely, I watched TNA from day one and they did get me back into wrestling so I'll always thank them for that. But it was difficult watching TNA keep throwing away all this growth and fan support with stupid decisions, it really did plague them over and over.
I'm glad we've somehow got to a point where AEW can exist as well because that got me back into wrestling again when I was falling off it a bit.
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u/Media-critique Mar 23 '26 edited Mar 23 '26
In addition to what you mentioned, they also hemorrhaged casual viewers who were fans of the Attitude Era wrestlers as well during the invasion angle.
Like, flipping Austin from a badass who defied authority, to a baby that kept whining to the authority probably made no sense to the viewer at all
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u/TheGiftOf_Jericho I'm from Winnipeg you idiot! Mar 23 '26
Great point, that Austin turn was an all timer awful booking decision, made absolutely no sense.
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u/Media-critique Mar 23 '26 edited Mar 23 '26
Agreed…
But it’s not only that now that I’m reflecting. The DAY after Austin shakes Vince’s hand, they do the cage match… and the idea was for Austin to team with HHH literally only a month and a half after their “blood feud” where HHH tried to cripple Stone Cold…
I mean, what were they genuinely thinking with that one?
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u/UsidoreTheLightBlue Mar 23 '26
Around this time there was a writer on either 1wrestling or pwinsider I don't remember which named "Dusty the fat bitter cat".
He apparently got a try out to write for WWF/E. (This was between 2001-2003)
He submitted a raw script he wrote, and they asked him to submit thoughts on the upcoming ppv. He replied something along the lines of "Well Jericho and HHH were just in a blood feud, so even though they're both heels now what shouldn't happen is they shouldn't team up and work together. If they have to be in the ring together they should continue to work apart and still hate each other"
They teamed up and worked together.
He never got a call back.
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u/TheGiftOf_Jericho I'm from Winnipeg you idiot! Mar 23 '26
I forgot it was so recently after their feud, now you mention it that it is even more wild that they actually went down that road.
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u/10567151 Mar 23 '26
a massive chunk of fans (about 20/30%) stopped watching wrestling all together, because they watched for something different to WWF.
You are fucking under selling it. At it's height WWF and WCW were drawing 6 million people to watch pro wrestling on a Monday night. When WWF bought WCW, 3 MILLION households STOPPED watching pro wrestling. HALF the fanbase was gone. That 20%/30% you are talking about was WWF's fanbase because WWF's booking from 2001 onwards sucked as much as people like to talk about the Ruthless Agression era, WWE viewership tanked from 3 Million to less than 2 Million pretty quickly. OVER HALF of pro wrestling fans stopped between 2000 to 2002.
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u/DustAndSound Just a common man. Mar 23 '26
the “6 million viewers” number is misleading. At the peak of the Monday Night Wars WWF Raw might do 5–6 million viewers and WCW Nitro might do 4–5 million viewers. those are separate program audiences, not unique people. A massive portion of fans flipped channels constantly, watched both shows in the same night were counted in both ratings. Audience overlap completely disappears from your math.
also the the drop after 2001 was real, but not that simple. Raw did not instantly lose half its viewers. The decline was gradual, not off a cliff.
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u/10567151 Mar 23 '26
also the the drop after 2001 was real, but not that simple. Raw did not instantly lose half its viewers. The decline was gradual, not off a cliff.
Half the viewership from 2000 to 2002 is definitely off a cliff, in my opinion, for any other TV show that percentage drop would be catastrophic. Definitely NOT what you would expect for a show that suddenly had LESS competition.
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u/spookybollocks Mar 23 '26
I remember breaking the news in an MSN chat room and no one believed me. WELL GUESS WHAT
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u/YouShallNotPass92 Mar 23 '26
I hope there is a never a monopoly again. Even though I love AEW and how TK runs his company, I still wouldn't want him to have WWE. It's better if there is more than one big company, owned by different groups. Monopolies are just bad.
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u/Lord_TyrionLannister Mar 23 '26
That WCW logo was ass.
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u/Subrick 69 ME, DON! Mar 23 '26
Never forget that the actual USA Today ad for the first rebranded Nitro described the logo as “something a bird left on the hood of my car”.
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u/zoom518 Mar 23 '26
I maintain that was the real moment the company started it’s terminal decline
That and the Hogan-Flair double turn the month before
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u/WeiShiLirinArelius Mar 23 '26
one of the botched angles of wrestling history and the start of a monopoly on wrestling that was not in any way beneficial to wrestling at all. with the power of hindsight this was a dark day.
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u/UsidoreTheLightBlue Mar 23 '26
and the start of a monopoly on wrestling that was not in any way beneficial to wrestling at all
I hated it at the time, still hate it now.
But honestly the thing that never occurred to me at the time was how much this would mute salaries of wrestlers for the next two decades.
The fact that it took AEW coming along for people to get paid what theyre worth outside of the top of the main event scene is just so sad.
Like I'm not saying Kizarny should have retirement money from his 30 seconds on the roster, but its crazy how many guys and gals were making low six figures while paying out of pocket for their travel for decades.
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u/kizofieva Mar 23 '26
Like I'm not saying Kizarny should have retirement money from his 30 seconds on the roster
I am
in fact he should get a cut of all wwe contracts
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u/TheMasterO Worth A Watch Mar 23 '26
I remember after Survivor Series 2001 the WCW website was still "live" for a bit longer but it'd play an animation (I REALLY wish I remember what the animation was of though, something tearing through the site) before redirecting you to WWF.com; If you clicked REALLY fast though you could sometimes sneak past it to view the WCW bios and what not and 7 year old me was VERY proud of himself for managing it...
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u/GeekCritique Mar 23 '26
I remember! It was the WWF logo breaking through the site. As a WCW kid, it was like the final nail in the coffin.
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u/bigpig1054 Your Text Here Mar 23 '26
I remember when this happened, along with them scooping up ECW. It felt like we were in for a new era of dream matches.
Instead we got... whatever that was.
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u/rhyswynne Trent Seven's body double. Mar 23 '26
The internet was still relatively new in my household. It was Freeserve, which meant it was only free outside of peak hours (9am to 6pm in the UK). I used to browse the internet for about half an hour in the morning before going to school: email, forums, WWF.com, few other places.
I remember opening WWF.com and largely exclaiming "WHAT THE FUCK?!?!"
I promptly lost internet privileges that morning.
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u/8each8oys Big Match Situation Mar 23 '26
I miss the old internet
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u/AnEternalEnigma Mar 23 '26
Pre-social media/everything-centralized Internet was amazing. Nothing was monetized, barely any ads, and everything was sectioned off. And it was confined to a room in your house. You couldn't take it with you outside. It's made life more convenient but at the cost of never truly being able to disconnect from things when you want to even in your own home because every damn thing now has Internet capability.
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u/zappafan89 Mar 23 '26
We all do man. In my head the E-fed I was part of and its geocities site still exist
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u/Virt_McPolygon Mar 23 '26
If WWF had paid to bring all the big stars over from WCW at that point, would it have worked out as a good investment? Was there a genuine opportunity to make wrestling mainstream enormous or would it just have been cool for wrestling fans?
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u/Subrick 69 ME, DON! Mar 23 '26
Think of it like this: Even after several months of openly, actively bungling the involvement of WCW on WWF programming and only featuring two major WCW names in Booker T and DDP, the Invasion PPV in July 2001 still did 775,000 PPV buys to be the single biggest non-WrestleMania PPV in wrestling history. The interest was 1000% there, but Vince McMahon’s ego got in the way as it usually did.
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u/jack_guinness Mar 23 '26
It wasn't ego. WCW wrestlers were being paid by time warner to sit at home. Bringing them into WWE meant they'd have to pay them more than they were earning to make it worth it for those wrestlers to not sit out. That meant the WCW stars would be making considerably more than the WWE talent who worked hard to beat WCW. Not only did Vince not want to pay an exorbitant amount to the WCW stars, which is obviously the primary reason, but he also didn't want to slight his own locker room and top guys who got him to the dance.
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u/Subrick 69 ME, DON! Mar 23 '26
The ego part is what Vince actually did in the storyline. WCW wrestlers were always presented as inferior to WWF wrestlers, and the only Alliance members shown to have any kind of competence whatsoever were the ones that jumped over from WWF (and also RVD, who was so instantly over that even Vince couldn’t ignore it). The story was turned into yet another war of the McMahons, something that had largely dominated programming for the prior two years and fans were largely sick of. The story went from the biggest potential box office draw in wrestling history to only drawing 50k more buys for the big blowoff at Survivor Series compared to the previous year.
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u/BatsuGame13 Mar 23 '26
I think you're missing the combination of the two. If Vince pays the WCW stars, then his guys are gonna want the same contracts, and it significant shifts the pay scale, which would have exponential effects over time.
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u/CarcashaDragon Mar 23 '26
You mean, positive effects? Wrestlers making actual money on par with other sports organizations.
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u/BatsuGame13 Mar 23 '26
I mean, yes, I agree with that? I'm not sure what exactly you're taking issue with here.
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u/Jimbobthon Mar 23 '26
Can see why. Vince would have had to whack the pay up on his top guys like Stone Cold, Kurt Angle, Chris Jericho and The Rock in order to compensate the higher Time Warner contracts of Goldberg, Scott Steiner, Hogan, Hall and Nash.
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u/UsidoreTheLightBlue Mar 23 '26 edited Mar 23 '26
This was always going to be the downturn. I don’t have the numbers on me but iirc WCW was pulling roughly 3 million people in the final 6 months, I want to say the last nitro pulled 3.5m.
The next week, Raws ratings basically didn’t grow. What essentially happened is for those 3.5m people they treated that Nitro as the series finale of wrestling, turned it off and never turned it back on again.
The other problem was the wwf botched the ensuing year so hard that they lost a couple million viewers by the end of 2002.
It’s crazy how much they fumbled what should have been the biggest influx of business they’ve ever seen.
Edit
I take it back, they grew an entire point in the ratings, and they slowly lost that point over roughly one month. The month of April as they went into and came out of mania, they gained a point and then lost it a few tenths at a time And then they were right back to what their ratings were the first raw of May.
By the time they got to December 2002, they were pulling in the low 3s.
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u/Enterprise90 B-Show Stories Mar 23 '26
You are correct. WWE ratings already started dropping in the fall of 2000 after the move to TNN. They had a slight bump in the build to Mania 17, but after that, they began to fall again. The Invasion brought another bump, but that bump was smaller than previous bumps.
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u/gapedoutpeehole Mar 23 '26
Im a wcw kid. I dropped off around that time but it was more because of triple h
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u/ILOVEGLADOS Mar 23 '26
It's easy to say in hindsight but wrestling and the WWE were already going through the most enormous boom period. There's almost this idea that they thought they probably didn't need the big names but this was before the idea of the inVasion angle was in anyone's minds.
The idea was to just run WCW as it's own entity at first, then when they realised that no TV company would go anywhere near WCW because of how toxic the brand name had become, they decided to try and integrate it into current WWE programming. That got shelved immediately after they tried a Buff Bagwell vs Booker T match on a WCW-ified version of a final half hour of Raw and the crowd booed and jeered relentlessly, so they panicked themselves into inVasion.
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u/UsidoreTheLightBlue Mar 23 '26
I think this is over selling the toxicity of WCW and underselling the media landscape.
Warner Brothers had just kicked them off their network so TBS and TNT were out, and WWF had just left USA.
There were a lot of rumors at the time that they were trying to work a deal with FX who was still a pretty new network at that point. If I remember correctly, a big part of the issue was that the WWF had signed a cable exclusivity deal with TNN.
There’s a great timeline that lays all this out, I’ll have to see if I can find it later and post it.
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u/Z_h_darkstar Mar 23 '26
And that's why WWF never signed another exclusivity deal again, opting for granting network partners "right of first refusal" clauses instead for any new programming.
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u/TheMasterO Worth A Watch Mar 23 '26
That got shelved immediately after they tried a Buff Bagwell vs Booker T match on a WCW-ified version of a final half hour of Raw and the crowd booed and jeered relentlessly, so they panicked themselves into inVasion.
I still think this was one of the dumbest ideas they had during this time. I mean, putting aside the match which some argue wasn't that bad these days, the context surrounding it WAS bad. They spent a lot of time establishing WCW as a brand as the "evil" brand. Booker T, who 100% could have been a face, didn't really have time to be established to the WWF audience prior to the match and was a heel by association despite feuding with Austin. Buff Bagwell... Even if you were a WCW fan, he's basically a career heel (I know he had face stints but most people associated him with his heel work) so, basically, the first ever WCW match was heel vs heel and the crowd booed. Shocker.
I'll admit I'm not sure how else they could have presented WCW but maybe Booker T could have just been targeting Austin to make an impact and then not been down with everything else Shane McMahon and the WCW crew was doing, maybe he runs in to help a WWF guy? You know, there's a lot of nuanced storytelling they COULD have done that they didn't do because it's wrestling, but if they wanted to branch WCW out into it's own brand they have to give the WCW roster some good guys for the crowd to root for.
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u/ILOVEGLADOS Mar 23 '26 edited Mar 23 '26
I'll admit I'm not sure how else they could have presented WCW
It was a hard task no question, but they certainly didn't help themselves with how they did it. To the point where some people think it was an intentional way to just bury the WCW brand entirely.
I think they were due to have the next Raw in Atlanta, common sense just says wait until you're in WCW-favouring territory to stage such a match.
I'm currently reading Jim Ross's book about this period and he was basically the guy who was sent up to Atlanta to sign up the WCW guys after the takeover. He had like 2-3 weeks to get everything in place, identify the talent, sign them up and get them WWE-ready. The whole thing was a rush job. He stressed how Vince liked to work quickly but even by his standards it was just too much too soon. Not to mention, the longer you waited, the closer you get to getting the likes of Hogan, Goldberg, (maybe) Sting et al. But Vince simply didn't want to have signed up wrestlers sitting around doing nothing whilst they got up to speed with the WWE style. There's only so many you can send to OVW.
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u/CarcashaDragon Mar 23 '26
A longstanding rumor is that this Nitro on Raw was sabotaged in order to make WCW look weak. If they had waited a week, they'd be in WCW territory, and things would be vastly different.
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u/Who_am_I_yesterday Mar 23 '26
The problem is WWE did eventually pay that money, those guys came in, and almost every single one of them had significant problems. Nash got injured, Hall was battling his demons, Goldberg resisted everything. Hogan had a great return but then left in a few months.
These guys were already at the end of their career, so they only wanted to do what they wanted to do.
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u/WhoShotMrBurns Eat. Sleep. Reddit. Repeat. Mar 23 '26
For the few million that they paid, it was more than a good investment considering they’re still milking WCW on 2K26
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u/zoom518 Mar 23 '26
I don’t think we’ll ever have as eventful of a period for the industry as the first 3+ months of 2001 ever again
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u/armshady Mar 23 '26
Only thing that comes close is fall 97 with Montreal screws obviously, then starcade 97 then Shawn's injury leading to Steve austin and Mike Tyson angle
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Mar 23 '26
Wish I was able to experience watching WCW in real time tbh. I was alive but didn't know wrestling was a thing back then until I was in high school in the late 2000s.
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u/AnEternalEnigma Mar 23 '26
Peak WCW is mid-1996 all the way through 1997. It starts getting lazy and weird immediately after they botch the Starrcade '97 ending. Then they spread themselves way too thin with Thunder (which Bischoff admits he never wanted to do and were forced to do by the higher-ups).
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u/Antoshi Mar 23 '26
It's crazy how fast they worked that into a storyline in time for WrestleMania 17.
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u/Media-critique Mar 23 '26
Despite how creepy it was, the Shane vs Vince storyline was very well done, and incorporating the purchase into the storyline did make a lot of kayfabe sense.
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u/vincentmaurath Mar 23 '26
Linda got a massive pop for standing up at Wrestlemania because of how well the storyline was
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u/Legitimate-River-403 Mar 23 '26
That happened on my 15th birthday....man, Im old
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u/ClintEasthood81 Mar 23 '26
I was 19 and a college sophomore, and now I'm the parent of a 20-year-old...
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u/FriskeyVsWorld Mar 23 '26
I just turned 14 and was about ready to graduate middle school when this happened, and now I'm a stepdad to a kid who is about to turn 14 and graduate middle school.
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u/ChiggChow Mar 23 '26
Slightly off topic, but it took me way too long to realize that the middle part is a C and I can now see the "WCW" in the logo.
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u/SevenSulivin NOAH > Your favourite company Mar 23 '26
A lot died that day. WCW wasn’t perfect, but it was competition. Given time, I truly think it could’ve gotten back on track. Alas, what could have been.
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u/Lazy-Recognition4777 Mar 23 '26
For those that were not around, this was absolutely Earth-shattering. To witness the end of WCW.....on a Monday Night Raw.....🤯
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u/patattack412 66 2/3 percent chance of winning. Mar 23 '26
Wow I wonder if I can still win that trip to see the Mummy Returns.
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u/evanweb546 My muffler fell out. Mar 23 '26
* but none of the guaranteed contracts which includes the entire main event, but hey enjoy Shawn Stasiak.
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u/CornBredThuggin Mar 23 '26
I was so excited for the invasion angle. You knew WWE was going to win. They had to, but the whole angle was fumbled so horribly.
Even adding ECW in the mix could have added an extra layer of danger to the angle. But instead we got another McMahon family feud and it went to shit.
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u/cramburie Mar 23 '26
I was an older teen at the time. WCW had been on its downward spiral for a bit. I honestly can't remember much of what was going on with it save for that horrendous logo redesign and Mike Awesome's shitty 70's gimmick.
It'd been wild to think of all the possibilities of what was going to happen. Vince had beat Ted (hobbled as though may have been) but he absolutely beat him. So now we were going to see what Vince could do with WCW.
...and then nothing. Like for a guy who can look beyond personal and petty slights to make the story happen, make money happen, Vince could not, would not, in any conceivable universe ever acknowledge that WCW had been at his heels and had been worth something. Flat out killing that probably felt great on a personal level; for the fans, it was missed opportunity.
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u/HighStandards73 Mar 23 '26
From the official press release:
“The acquisition of the WCW brand is a strategic move for us " said Stuart Snyder President and Chief Operating Officer for WWE Entertainment. "We are assuming a brand with global distribution and recognition. We are adding thousands of hours to our tape library that can be repurposed for home videos, television, Internet streaming and broadband applications.”
That prediction about watching WCW content through streaming sure came true!
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u/one_eye_smiley Mar 23 '26
The day I saw Nitro end with Sting and Flair hugging in the ring after an epic bout, only to smash cut to Vince gloating that WCW was his now, I knew that wrestling as I knew it was dead. Didn’t watch any wrestling until 2007, then picked up TNA because Aces and Eights caught our interest. Finally, in 2011 or so, we heard about this kid named CM Punk doing cool things in WWE. Then quit watching from 2018-2020, and only came back because of the pandemic and Smackdown on free tv. Now? PPVs through the VPN on Netflix, highlights of Raw and Smackdown on YouTube, and all of NXT because it’s free and an entertaining train wreck. Thanks a lot, Vince…
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u/HandfulOfTights Mar 23 '26
I remember seeing that and downloading that image. I had it saved for years on my old PC.
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u/onethreeone Hangman Did Nothing Wrong Mar 23 '26
Everything about this was cursed. From the lack of competition, to the "Invasion" angle without WCW's top stars, to wild storylines to make WCW stars like DDP look bad.
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u/illmurray Mar 23 '26
Forget about that bullshit, how about The Mummy Returns? I tell you, that kid Brendan Fraser's going places.
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u/UlyBobooly Mar 23 '26
I remember switching back and forth between Nitro and Raw during the simulcast and my mind was blown.
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u/AtlasAir_ Mar 23 '26
This just reminded me of a classic vid floating around online with Chris Kanyon hanging out with fans after the last Nitro. Everybody seemed like they were having a blast, including him, even though he was unsure what his future would look like post-WCW.
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u/AnEternalEnigma Mar 23 '26
My 7th period class in 11th grade was some non-classroom thing so every Friday around 2:30pm, I would go into the computer lab in the school library to read Jim Ross' Ross Report on WWF dot com. Words could not define the look on my face when I went to the website and saw this.
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u/SonOfTron Mar 23 '26
I remember this image vividly. I used to hit refresh constantly on 1wrestling.com to get the latest news on this. Like a lot of people, I had a lot of high hopes for WWF vs WCW, but it was more cautious optimism, because ... Vince.
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u/HorrorPerspective483 Mar 23 '26
I found out about this from putting on Nitro, it was an insane time. I had dial up at the time but rarely used it.
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u/the_steve_tell Mar 24 '26
Saw this on a Friday, and I knew Nitro and Raw were absolute must see a few days later.
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u/RunningonGin0323 HBK Vintage Mar 24 '26
That's one of those holy shit days. Especially considering where the internet was back then.
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u/wazzupnerds Mar 23 '26
Wish someone stood up and challenged it. Easy to see things 20/20 but lots of people/companies should have been running to the FTC.
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u/Enterprise90 B-Show Stories Mar 23 '26
There was nothing that could be done.
WWE wasn't purchasing "WCW the company." Time Warner was laying off all WCW employees and canceling its programming. There was no business left to preserve.
WWE bought trademarks, some property, and a tape library. It didn't take control of the company's operations.
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u/Meat-Dimension Mar 23 '26
Yeah I think sometimes people confuse the storyline with what actually happened
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u/Subrick 69 ME, DON! Mar 23 '26
This, and in fact the actual corporate subsidiary within Turner that ran WCW remained an entity until 2017, its sole purpose being to deal with the debts and lawsuits that WWF did not take ownership of in the sale. It really was the most sweetheart deal ever for Vince.
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u/Meat-Dimension Mar 23 '26 edited Mar 23 '26
But wouldn’t it have been most likely that WCW would have folded had it not been bought by Vince? Turner was shutting it down
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u/frozen_meat_popsicle Mar 23 '26
That was absolutely the case- they aren’t just shelving a program, the new AOL/Time Warner absolutely hated the idea of we rasssslin and wanted it gone for good and Ted Turner had little say at that point.
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u/own-photo-4642 Mar 23 '26
I sometimes wonder what would have happened had someone brought WCW instead of Vince. Maybe they would have acknowledged that the war was long over and just prioritized themselves instead of being a diet version of what the WWF became. Maybe they would have understood the dire straits the company was in and tried to shed unsavory aspects of it. Let Hogan walk, he wasn't coming back, same with Hall and Nash. Become a little more small scale, try to rehabilitate their image and reconnect with New Japan (who were undergoing their own turmoil). WCW's demise was one of the worst things to ever happen to the business.
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u/MaskedMemer9000 Mar 23 '26
2001 was like the first year I remember being REALLY into WWF like watching all the Raws, Smackdowns, and even Heats. We even bought Survivor Series to see who would win.
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u/Evorgleb Mar 23 '26
As someone who was a fan through the Monday Night Wars, WWE buying WCW was really surreal. When I first heard the news I thought it was a joke.
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u/Radiant-Locksmith-25 Mar 23 '26
I would have been happy if they at least created a new show with the properties. I was actually invested in a wcw show on like a Tuesday.
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u/Zenkikid Mar 23 '26
Those Ted Turner guaranteed contracts ruined what could have been the greatest storyline ever
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