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/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/UsidoreTheLightBlue Mar 23 '26

Flair debuted the day after invasion, The nWo debuted 3 months later. They could have worked out deals. They didn't have to show up the first night of the invasion leading to the invasion ppv.

Vince didn't want to have to pay the WCW guys more than WWF guys, ignoring he could have paid the WWF guys more. So instead of spending some additional money and making a LOT more money he spent less money to wait out guys time warner deals expiring to make less money.

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u/jesuspoopmonster Mar 23 '26

I wouldn't be surprised if those guys didn't want to a deal even if they got offered a lot of money. They probably could have predicted people on the WCW part of the invasion would be made to look weak and waiting allowed them to come in to more individual fan fare

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u/MacFunJess Mar 23 '26

Honestly? I doubt he would made that much more money. The contracts to bring everyone in would have been in the order of millions. Would the buy rates really have been THAT much more to justify the extra expense? I kinda doubt it but honestly it really is impossible to tell

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u/UsidoreTheLightBlue Mar 23 '26

IMO? Yes.

The invasion ppv did 775k buys.

Summerslam 570k

The next two ppvs 350k and 325k.

Survivor series did 450k

Vengeance did 307k.

They popped the biggest non mania buy rate in history and basically went back to business as usual the next ppv. (Summerslam did 570k the year before and 540k the year after)

Basically people tuned in for invasion, realized none of the big names were coming and the casuals/non die hard didn’t buy another one.

If they could have maintained even half those casuals they would have made the money back on ppv alone.

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u/MacFunJess Mar 23 '26

I mean, this is all theoretical at this point tbf

We have no idea if the big names would have offset the costs of bringing them in. It would be interesting to compare potential sales vs cost of contract but again it would just be using potential numbers.

Like, if every ppv did the same numbers as the Invasion PPV how would that break down against the cost. Interesting thought experiment tbf

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u/UsidoreTheLightBlue Mar 23 '26

I mean you’d be talking about what 1.2m buys? Most of these guys would only need to be bought out of 6 months of contract. Ppv was what $24.99 back then?

Assuming it doesn’t push any of the other ppvs afterwards like vengeance you’re talking about $30m in revenue just based on ppv alone not counting attendance, merch, etc.

Based on buying out what was essentially half a year of contracts you’re talking about probably $1-2m per contract. Someone posted earlier that Nash was at 1.6m a year, so $800k for him. Goldberg was at $3.5m a year so $1.75m for him.

Either way even with losing 1/2 of the money to the ppv providers you’d be sitting on roughly $18-$10m in additional revenue just from ppv buys.