Embrodak

At this point it seems like a lot of hot air, but I sure as shit am not watching or discussing WWE ever again if the fucking Saudi government buys it. What a fucking swerve, though!

You know what’s weird is they removed Edge because he didn’t want to do spoopy stuff and then didn’t do any spoopy stuff when they replaced him with Finn. Judgment Day are essentially a biker gang at this point, which is a much better fit for Rhea and Priest but not something either Finn or Edge feel holistically suited for. Did they change their mind about spoopy, or was that just bullshit?

He came out in Sephiroth cosplay to Sephiroth music.

Vince is hot shotting his own corporate takeover, just unreal.

I think it’s probably geographic, too. Crowds in NYC were going to be different from crowds in the Deep South, in terms of how much media education/exposure they had. Plus there’s a bit of that Fox Mulder “I want to believe” aspect.

I’m not into Finn in Judgment Day, Edge was a much better leader for that faction even with his thespian delivery. Finn is best as a douchebag heel, not an evil heel. Nevertheless, Rhea and Dom and Priest all look good in it, this is the first time Dom has had *any* juice that wasn’t just his dad’s fumes. Getting to maybe fuck Rhea Ripley is the best motivation for a heel turn in history.

I can’t speak for NXT Level Up, but Dark and Elevation are both way botchier than anything else I’ve ever seen presented by a national wrestling company with a television presence, on average.

You okay bud

Is there any point to having a YouTube show? Has there been a single star that “got their reps in” on Dark that was then ready for national television?

Roman versus Rock if they can get him Roman versus Cody if they can’t. Brock versus Gunther Theory versus Cena if they can get him Rhea versus Bianca Ray versus Dominik Sheamus versus…… uh….. Bray Wyatt? Edge versus Bray Wyatt? Idk Sami/KO versus Usos Rollins versus Stone Cold if they can get him

Honestly, NBC or Fox seem like the only rational buyers to me. If you’re going to be paying them rights fees, anyway, might as well just own the fucking thing and be making pure profit on the ads in 10 years or so. However, given how many boomers (the last big audience of TV watchers) are going to die in the next 10-15 years, and how little juice there is in the wrestling business as a live event biz compared to its heyday, I can also see plenty of companies saying wrestling is on borrowed time and not worth sinking money into. The idea of the Saudis buying it is pretty entertaining and farcical, but as Brian Last pointed out, they may be the only idiots with the money *to* buy WWE that aren’t gonna look at the big financial picture and pooh-pooh it.

Wait did Kenny really come out dressed as Sephiroth to the Sephiroth song

What’s weird is Punk wasn’t *that* big of a ratings draw, but he seems to have taken a chunk of the audience with him, anyway.

Honestly, contemporary wrestling has an incredibly bizarre business model that even the people inside of it probably barely understand, let alone any of us outsiders. What used to be a business of ticket sales to the broadest possible audience has become a business of merchandising and media rights finding increasing ways to more intensively mine a diminishing pool of fans.

It’s terrible for WWE and for the industry as a whole, but in terms of the meta-narrative of Vince’s utterly bizarre psyche, there is a darkly comic element to the image of him stewing in his house for eight months and deciding that this was the course he wanted to take.

That’s not what happened, but this ain’t the forum to discuss geopolitics. Sorry I dropped that name. Message me if you wanna argue, I don’t wanna derail. Bubba Kawada - I suspect that they just did a lot of damage with the booking, injuries, and other bullshit last year and are going to need time to rebuild trust and interest. When was the last time they had a truly hot feud, honestly?

Tony Khan has to be frozen in a dab since yesterday. Vince retiring was the worst thing that ever happened to AEW, it removed the one true and inescapable raison d’etre for his company existing, and it was looking increasingly likely that both established and younger stars were going to trust Trips more than Tony to shepherd their livelihoods. Now? Who the fuck knows?

Corny’s theory that Vince has CTE from taking too many chair shots at way too old of an age is looking more and more likely.

William Regal has to be shitting himself right now.

On the one hand, WWE clearly did not take Covid that seriously. On the other, as a nurse, I can say that absolutely no politician other than Xi Jinping took Covid seriously enough. Lee might have been fucked no matter what.

I just like territory wresting better brother.

Lmaoooooooo

I was accused of being a troll account for saying that I think Jeff Jarrett and Jay Lethal are excellent talents, among other reasons. It seems like everybody here has like three people they suspect are just trolls.

Wardlow can handle loss just fine. It’s that his post-MJF booking was with charisma black hole Scorpio Sky, then feuding with a fake comedy lawyer and having an embarrassing match with fake security guards, then having an ice cold tag team with Samoa Joe that existed *only* to be broken up and precipitate an extremely disjointed and boring feud that was half stippled with Joe being an RoH champ. I didn’t want Wardlow to be Goldberg, and he didn’t *need* to be Goldberg. He’s not a marvel in the ring, but he can go well enough to get by, and with that many vets in the locker room, you can’t tell me that they couldn’t have found something to capitalize on him becoming the hottest motherfucker in the company off the MJF feud, especially with how many upper card to main event openings there were in the wake of all those injuries. Darby’s overness is going to last as long as he can bump like a Dolph Ziggler mannequin, but Wardlow may have had just the one shot, unless he moves to WWE. One can reverse what you’re saying and argue that if AEW is so inflexible as a company that they can’t push a guy unless he’s an MJF level wrestler or better, *that’s a problem, too*.

I thought that with Lee at the time, but at this point, I get exactly why WWE let Lee go. Swerve has been good in AEW, Lee has been thoroughly underwhelming and appears to have lost several steps after his Covid infection.