And why wasn’t it making money? Well, because Vince Russo made lots and lots of bad decisions. He took a company that turned a profit of $30 million dollars, and made it one that lost over $60 million dollars.
But, Russo was only there to fix the mess that Bischoff had put the company in. Russo is an easy scapegoat, but Bischoff’s refusal to look past Hogan is a huge contributing factor to the death of WCW.
Hogan had a shelf life, and Bischoff – and Hogan – couldn’t see that. And giving Hogan creative control from the get go did lead to a lot of issues on what were supposed to be big shows.
He also spent big on contracts.
Contracts that were so big that when WWF bought WCW, they didn’t pick up a lot of the TimeWarner contracts for the likes of Hogan, Hall, Nash, Goldberg etc because it would have upset their own pay structure in the WWF.
But perhaps the person who killed WCW was the man who created it in the first place.
A lot of WCW’s problems can be traced back to Ted Turner’s decision to merge with Time Warner in 1995.
If Turner hadn’t made that merger, they wouldn’t have been involved in the AOL merger of 2000 which wouldn’t have brought in Jamie Kellner who pulled the trigger on the Death of WCW
Turner lost a lot of power after the TimeWarner merger, and even more from the AOL one.
Eric Bischoff even argues that once Turner lost his power after the TimeWarner merger, he no longer was able to have Eric’s back and sign off on his big money spending, and he had other people to answer to who didn’t like the way he spent money, like giving wrestlers big contracts.
You could make the argument for any one of these people being the ultimate reason for the downfall of WCW, but in actuality, it was all of them.
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