MoS Posted March 31, 2014 Report Share Posted March 31, 2014 Hello everyone. I am a wrestling fan from India; been one for close to 15 years now. I like reading as much as I possibly can about wrestling. This is something I have often wondered: how successful was ECW as a promotion? I have heard varied accounts. Some say that ECW never made Heyman a dime; while others talk about how he took Eastern Championship Wrestling from a struggling regional promotion drawing less than 200 to its shows to the third most successful American wrestling promotion of the 90s. Which one is closer to the truth? Can ECW be considered, all in all, a more successful promotion than WCW, seeing how WCW had everything, yet ultimately failed in a spectacular manner? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
goc Posted March 31, 2014 Report Share Posted March 31, 2014 This is something I have often wondered: how successful was ECW as a promotion? I have heard varied accounts. Some say that ECW never made Heyman a dime; while others talk about how he took Eastern Championship Wrestling from a struggling regional promotion drawing less than 200 to its shows to the third most successful American wrestling promotion of the 90s. Both those statements can be true if only 2 wrestling promotions in America were profitable. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bix Posted March 31, 2014 Report Share Posted March 31, 2014 I think John Lister broke this down once in detail, maybe in his ECW book, but it's pretty much impossible ECW ever made a profit once it really got going. Their costs increased too much as they drew more. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sidebottom Posted March 31, 2014 Report Share Posted March 31, 2014 Too big to be little, too little to be big. They booked themselves into an awkward corner they couldn't fight out of. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mookeighana Posted March 31, 2014 Report Share Posted March 31, 2014 It's also important to recognize how inflated wrestling salaries were getting with WCW & WWF. For instance, as of May 2000: Bam Bam Bigelow was getting $400k-$450k/year from WCW Mike Awesome was getting $350k/year from WCW (plus lots of nightly $2000+ bonuses) Shane Douglas was getting $350-$375k/year from WCW (plus lots of nightly $2000+ bonuses) Mikey Whipwreck made $75k from WCW in 1999. Saturn was making $165k (1998) / $274k (1999) from WCW. Each member of Public Enemy was earning $160k (1997) to $175K (1998) in payroll from WCW. (I'm getting these numbers from exhibits that were filed in the Sonny Onoo lawsuit.) Talent was expensive, and keeping guys was expensive. There just wasn't a large enough income stream (no big TV rights, third-tier #s for PPVs) to support the weight of a real national operation. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Negro Suave Posted March 31, 2014 Report Share Posted March 31, 2014 ECW was not profitable. Then again wrestling in general is not very profitable with WWE being the exception to the rule. WCW was turning record profits, and that is indeed a measure of success and something that ECW failed to do in the same timeframe. (Late 90's). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Migs Posted March 31, 2014 Report Share Posted March 31, 2014 How did they stay afloat as long as they did? As early as 96-97, they were bringing in huge amounts of expensive talent and only selling tickets in 1000 seat venues and selling tapes and t-shirts. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
(BP) Posted March 31, 2014 Report Share Posted March 31, 2014 Well, Heyman was 9 million dollars in debt when all was said and done. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Matt Farmer Posted March 31, 2014 Report Share Posted March 31, 2014 In the few years of business running the ECW Arena was no longer profitable. I do believe that Paul Heyman made money off ECW, there was a saying that Paul had money stuffed under his matress. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Boon Posted March 31, 2014 Report Share Posted March 31, 2014 Can't remember who it was who said it on the Forever Hardcore DVD, but someone said something along the lines of "when it closed, it wasn't like they were performing in front of no one?" Which is true, but also shows how much they were in the red come the summer of 2000. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mookeighana Posted March 31, 2014 Report Share Posted March 31, 2014 Can't remember who it was who said it on the Forever Hardcore DVD, but someone said something along the lines of "when it closed, it wasn't like they were performing in front of no one?" Which is true, but also shows how much they were in the red come the summer of 2000. Remember though, the real goal was to get a National Television deal that would support them. To put in perspective: in 1999, on USA/UPN, WWF made about $7.3M in Domestic TV Rights,$5.5M in Int'l TV Rights and $65M in television advertising. (PPV revenue was about $94M on 6.1 million buys) By 2001, on Viacom Spike/MTV and UPN, WWE was up to $31.2M in Domestic TV rights, $18.5M in Int'l TV Rights and $84.7M in television advertising. (PPV revenue was about $120M on 7.6 million buys) Had ECW been able to secure a new national TV contract after being booted from TNN, even on USA, they would have had a shot. But it had to be on a real station - not paying for time, or some regional sports channel. Heyman gave up when he knew they weren't going to get that magic TV contract and he didn't see the reason to keep going on. With proper TV, ECW may have been able to hit 100k buys/month so ECW PPV buys would probably have generated at least $16M on ten PPVs/year on top of TV advertising and TV Rights. However, they were seen on below second tier so they got lousy deals and that was the death blow. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jdw Posted March 31, 2014 Report Share Posted March 31, 2014 The company and Heyman as an individual both went BK. It was always a hand-to-mouth thing, also with Heyman bilking several investors, banks, vendors/companies and his folks. On some level, it was almost a Ponzi scheme. Was every month a net negative? Unlikely. They were probably months where he took in more than went out. But that also was a false profit: things like getting an upfront fee/advance on a deal that would come out of later revenue the vendor made, and not factoring in the debt load he was carrying. I suspect that if a real accountant had all the real information across the whole history, it would have been bleak the whole time. John Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mookeighana Posted March 31, 2014 Report Share Posted March 31, 2014 Some fun reads: ECW's stunning money woes made public: http://slam.canoe.ca/SlamWrestlingECW/apr11_ecwwoes-can.html The documents obtained by SLAM! Wrestling detail an expansive list of people, companies and government bodies ECW (Heyman and HHG) owes millions upon millions of dollars to. In total, Heyman through HHG Corp. has $8,881,435.17 in unpaid bills (all figures U.S. dollars). Heyman claims to only have $1,385,500 in assets. Heyman's assets include $2,000 in a personal bank account, ECW's video tape library (valued at $500,000), unsold ECW merchandise totaling $4,000, a 1998 Ford F 800 Truck worth $19,500 (Heyman still owes $14.455.14 on it) and forthcoming payments from In Demand, Acclaim and The Original San Francisco Toymakers that total $860,000. Some of the creditors holding the largest unsecured claims are Annodeus Incorporated -- a subsidiary of Acclaim Entertainment ($1 million), The World Wrestling Federation ($587,500), Farm Club Online Inc. ($300,000), The Original San Francisco Toymakers ($250,000), MSG Network Inc. -- America's largest regional sports network ($244,000), American Cable Productions Inc. ($243,000), In Demand L.L.C. -- an American pay-per-view network ($150,000), wrestler Rob Van Dam ($150,000), wrestler Tommy Dreamer ($100,000), Stonecutter Productions (owned by former ECW lawyer Steve Karel - $75,000) and Karel himself, $50,000. The filing reveals that the I.R.S. claims that Heyman hasn't paid his taxes either. Also, $30,000 is still owed to the New York State Department Of Taxation and Finance for taxes on ECW wrestling events and The State Of Connecticut is making the same "withholding taxes" charge stating that Heyman should pay them $4,000. Heyman and his lawyer are disputing these claims. Noted in the enormous list of creditors comprised of cable companies, travel agencies, media corporations (including TNN), advertising agencies, hospitals, insurance companies, financial institutions, courier companies, universities and plaintiffs with personal injury suits against ECW are these former ECW wrestlers, managers and announcers An analysis of ECW's Bankruptcy Petition - Forensic accountant and fan Bob Kapur takes a look : http://slam.canoe.ca/SlamWrestlingECW/apr12_ecwkapur-can.html So, What Happened? Getting back to that whole "puzzle" thing from my first paragraph, what the heck happened? How could a company which made $5.8 million in 1999 and $4.1 million in 2000 hit the wall so hard so fast? Well, it didn't. Actually, it looks to me like this situation has been lingering for a long time now. Salaries of guys who had left a few years ago, like Shane Douglas, were still unpaid. How long had this been going on? Many TV stations, radio stations, advertising companies and the like were owed money. Who knows when these debts originated? Remember the ECW action figures that came out a couple of years ago? It looks like the manufacturers waited a while, too -- they're owed about a quarter of a million dollars. Truth be told, I can't tell what the problem was. Fiscal mismanagement, lack of priorities, apathy, absentmindedness -- oops, I still can't find my chequebook. Without further information, it's just not possible to tell. Too many missing pieces. For you cynics and naysayers, it does NOT look like Heyman screwed everyone and took off with the money himself. In fact, he's out to lose over $125,000 for backpay, and others in his family are owed over $3.5 million. It seems to me that the whole Heyman clan made major sacrifices in order to keep the company alive this long. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bix Posted March 31, 2014 Report Share Posted March 31, 2014 I forget exactly how they worked, but the Acclaim and TNN deals did much more harm than good. I know the upgrades to the production equipment to get it up to TNN standards was a major outlay. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jdw Posted March 31, 2014 Report Share Posted March 31, 2014 Somewhere buried in the depths of a tOA archive disk are several long, really well written pieces by Frank on what we gleaned from ECW's BK documents. The threads were pretty good as well as we had Chad pipping in, and he'd done a decent amount of BK work over the years... and I think a few other folks as well who had good insight into what some of the more obscure items listed likely related to. Sure, we had a lot of fun with "Tommy's Truck", but there was a good chunk of info there. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pantherwagner Posted March 31, 2014 Report Share Posted March 31, 2014 Dave Meltzer has mentioned several times: in the end ECW was profitable but it was Vince who made all the money. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
efrim Posted March 31, 2014 Report Share Posted March 31, 2014 My impression was always that Paul was too aggressive and took on debts that even a fast growing company couldn't hope to outpace. What I've always wondered is if a more fiscally conservative approach would have worked, or if that would have just ended up being death by 1000 cuts instead of the swan dive that it was. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
shakla Posted March 31, 2014 Report Share Posted March 31, 2014 Can't remember who it was who said it on the Forever Hardcore DVD, but someone said something along the lines of "when it closed, it wasn't like they were performing in front of no one?" Which is true, but also shows how much they were in the red come the summer of 2000. Thought it was Dreamer in the WWE doc. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
anarchistxx Posted March 31, 2014 Report Share Posted March 31, 2014 For you cynics and naysayers, it does NOT look like Heyman screwed everyone and took off with the money himself. In fact, he's out to lose over $125,000 for backpay, and others in his family are owed over $3.5 million. Never knew this, makes Heyman look like some kind of 90s Dixie Carter. A company that never made a dime, bankrolled byrelatives, where the figurehead was pumping in tons of family money and had a prominent position on television and the booking team - sound familiar? Was ECW just a vanity project? Do we fail to see it as such because it was an enjoyable, innovative product? One thing is for sure, if Heyman had connections enough to secure $3.5 million off his relatives, there is surely not a lot of legitimacy in the idea that he would need or bother to store a few grand in his mattress. What I've always wondered is if a more fiscally conservative approach would have worked, or if that would have just ended up being death by 1000 cuts instead of the swan dive that it was. You might have ended up like a slightly bigger version of ROH, but I am sceptical Heyman would have wanted that. He seemed far too egotistical and ambitious in his aims to settle for a small regional company, he wanted to go all the way and take the big boys on. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MoS Posted April 1, 2014 Author Report Share Posted April 1, 2014 I read somewhere that Heyman himself made quite a bit of money from it, and ultimately used it to get himself a fat contract with Vince; that the filing for bankruptcy was just so that Vince could more easily purchase the assets. Is that correct? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Clayton Jones Posted April 1, 2014 Report Share Posted April 1, 2014 I've always felt that a big part of ECW's problem was Heyman's propensity to bring in outside talent or bring back guys that probably cost him a ton, seemed like a big deal from the outside, but likely did very little to increase business. Sid always stuck out like a sore thumb in this regard, as well as bringing back Raven and Sandman. A great example of a talent that ECW could have used 10 more of was Corino, a young guy who was hungry, knew how to work their audience, probably worked cheap, and helped get everyone over around him. If Heyman had focused more on building talent like that after he was at the point it was inevitable his roster was going to get raided on a regular basis, would ECW have not bled such huge losses? Or would that have been just a drop in the bucket and a step closer to become a glorified ROH as mentioned? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kjh Posted April 1, 2014 Report Share Posted April 1, 2014 One thing people forget here is that ECW had to pay for syndication in many markets. It wasn't just the talent costs exploding in the midst of the Monday Night Wars, but other costs of trying to be competitive too. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
goc Posted April 1, 2014 Report Share Posted April 1, 2014 That's the big point. WWF essentially gave up on syndication and focused pretty much exclusively on cable in 1996 due to the costs of syndication being so high. ECW didn't have that option and had to pay to be on TV their entire existence. It seems kind of impossible for them to have expanded and remained profitable at the same time because putting TV in a new market was so expensive that it seems like they would have needed to run bigger arenas than what they ran to make it work. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sidebottom Posted April 1, 2014 Report Share Posted April 1, 2014 A great example of a talent that ECW could have used 10 more of was Corino, a young guy who was hungry, knew how to work their audience, probably worked cheap, and helped get everyone over around him. The same Corino who when was made champ many felt the promotion had lost its soul? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
efrim Posted April 1, 2014 Report Share Posted April 1, 2014 A great example of a talent that ECW could have used 10 more of was Corino, a young guy who was hungry, knew how to work their audience, probably worked cheap, and helped get everyone over around him. The same Corino who when was made champ many felt the promotion had lost its soul? Was that really a talking point at the time? Seems like an odd complaint coming not so long after a Justin Credible reign. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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