How profitabe was ECW?

[Bierschwale]

I was thinking about the sub-ECW American indie scene, and how it seems obvious now that Heyman should have signed the OMEGA crew wholesale in '97-'98, considering that those guys were just about to bring the ECW-inspired insanity into the mainstream. Except that I can't imagine how poorly that a bunch of blowjob faces in their early 20s like the Hardys, Helms, and Moore probably would have gone over with the Philly mouthbreathers, as a Philly mouthbreather myself.

[The Chief]

They had York and Matthews as Hardy Boys lite during the final days and I don't think they were necessarily despised.

[Dooley]

 

 

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.

 

 

That was my first thought in reading that. If anything, Corino and his whole "King of Old School" schtick was the perfect heel for the ECW mutants.

[Sidebottom]

I used to post on the official ECW forum in 2000, and people didn't mind Justin. He had tenure with the company, had cracking matches working up the card gradually over a few years against the likes of Sabu, Jerry Lynn and was fresh out of the awesome Impact Players where he teared it up (convincingly) with other established acts like RVD, Mike Awesome, Raven and others. The belt was put on him coming out of the Mike Awesome fiasco as the one to have a lengthily run with it detached from the obvious booking to get out of that situation, and was done smartly by having him beat Dreamer and not Tazz.

 

Corino was perceived as a nobody in 1999. He was a fun mid carder with Rhino (who went on to better things quicker and more realisticly) and Jack Victory in 2000, but when he won the belt, most felt it came out of nowhere. Only the summer prior he was in mid card matches getting mutilated by Jerry Lynn writing DIE onto his stomach with Corino's blood, and bumping around for Dusty.

 

I'm not saying Corino wasn't heading in the right direction, it just came too early after a face turn, and too early in general. It didn't help winning the title in one hell of a stupid match idea (Double Jeopardy, two matches happening at one time). Which to my original point, was a time period of poor booking and bad memories for ECW fans.

[Petey]

I think the problem was that the independent talent pool started to dry up in the late 90's and it was becoming more difficult to replace departing ECW "stars" with equal or close to talented wrestlers and that's why he went back to Raven and Sandman instead of building up new talent.

 

In that WWE.com article they did about the plans for ECW if it survived, it sounded like the plan was to transition the company into a similar style to what wound up being ROH since Paul thought the hardcore style was dead. I think Heyman even name dropped some of the guys that went on to work for ROH during its infancy. I don't know how true that is, but if ECW had survived another two years, it'd have been interesting.

[Bix]

One thing to keep in mind is that the Mikey Whipwreck trainees started at the House of Hardcore before ECW closed. So the Maximos, Quiet Storm, and Chris Devine all would've showed up in ECW at the very least. I don't think Brian XL was a Mikey trainee.

[Dylan Waco]

I've talked about this before, but I literally had friends quit watching for good when credible won the title.

[mookeighana]

I think the problem was that the independent talent pool started to dry up in the late 90's and it was becoming more difficult to replace departing ECW "stars" with equal or close to talented wrestlers and that's why he went back to Raven and Sandman instead of building up new talent.

 

In that WWE.com article they did about the plans for ECW if it survived, it sounded like the plan was to transition the company into a similar style to what wound up being ROH since Paul thought the hardcore style was dead. I think Heyman even name dropped some of the guys that went on to work for ROH during its infancy. I don't know how true that is, but if ECW had survived another two years, it'd have been interesting.

 

That's a good article if people haven't read it: http://www.wwe.com/classics/ecw/what-if-ecw-didnt-close-26114690

 

Of course, with the benefit of hindsight it's easier to imagine how ECW could have evolved into ROH, but really they were very different models originally - at least what late 90s ECW was versus early 2000s ROH.

 

ROH was based on Tape/DVD sales and using talented but new indy wrestlers, inspired from the back of the King of the Indies Tournament. TV wasn't really part of the model and it wasn't driven around weekly salaries / exclusive contracts.

[goc]

I can't see guys like Quiet Storm and especially Chris Divine getting over in front of an ECW crowd.

[Bierschwale]

It depends on how much you want to compare the CZW and ECW crowds. Jody Fleisch-Jonny Storm at the '02 Best of the Best tournament was considered the greatest CZW match ever by the CZW internet contingent for as long as I was paying attention and had a rapturous reception at the Bingo Hall.

[Memphis Mark]

I always thought ECW when out of business due to poor management. At that time wrestling was a cash business. Tickets , tapes , t shirts and other gimmicks were purchased with cash at the live shows. We are talking about hundreds and hundreds of thousand of dollars steaming into the business in the form of cash .

 

Did all of that cash find it way to the bank ? I don't think so . Skimming of the top is common in a cash business . So I don't think all of that money went to buy tv time or pay for talent. Only Paul Heymen and his cousin Steve know where all of the cah went and they ain't telling nobody.

 

I don't think it was a talent issue that killed ECW. Homicide , Low Ki , Samoa Joe , AJ Stytles , CM Punk, Colt Cabana, Chris Hero , Paul London , Bryan Danielson were are in the available talent pool as of 2001. It was mismanagement of their cash flow destroyed the company.

[thebrainfollower]

Is there any truth to the rumors that Atlantic City and various other vices ended up with a lot of ECW's profits?

[jdw]

What profits?

[thebrainfollower]

Wrong word. Ticket sales, merchandising etc. That they would have lost less money or maybe broken even if Heyman hadn't blown them. That's what I had heard more than once though I cannot recall where.

[goc]

Probably from ECW guys who just didn't understand how the company could go out of business when they were still in front of hot crowds. Pretty much just some bullshit someone made up.

[jdw]

Wrong word. Ticket sales, merchandising etc. That they would have lost less money or maybe broken even if Heyman hadn't blown them. That's what I had heard more than once though I cannot recall where.

 

Unlikely.

[cm funk]

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?

 

I highly doubt Sid was being paid his "going rate". ECW was a stopover between WWF and WCW for him, and he wasn't even wrestling. All of these guys who passed through the company......Foley, Austin etc. have talked about how they made no money at all working for ECW, but it was a place to go and keep your profile up in between WCW/WWF. Where Heyman got hurt with contracts was the guys he had to give big guaranteed deals that he really couldn't afford just to keep them from going to WCW or WWF. The talent raids were a double edged sword where he'd either lose key talent, or give them way too much to keep them around. No promotion has ever survived when it's being poached the way ECW was.

 

Heyman just did a 2 part interview with Steve Austin which I highly recommend if you're interested in this topic. I always take everything wrestlers/promoters say with a grain of salt, and we all know Heyman's "used car salesman" rep......but he makes a fairly strong argument for his side of the death of ECW, and how the company could have been saved if a few things had broken the right way.

[jdw]

Basically take 95% of what Heyman says about ECW and throw it on the woodpile.

[Eduardo]

Basically take 95% of what Heyman says about ECW and throw it on the woodpile.

*Talking about their least favorite people in the business*

Steve Sims: "The last one I will bury is the one I would least like to do business with, from here to eternity and that's Mr. [Paul] Heyman."

Bryan Alvarez: "Really?"

Steve Sims: "Oh yeah, don't trust him. He knows how I feel, if he remembers me..."

[Migs]

 

 

Heyman just did a 2 part interview with Steve Austin which I highly recommend if you're interested in this topic. I always take everything wrestlers/promoters say with a grain of salt, and we all know Heyman's "used car salesman" rep......but he makes a fairly strong argument for his side of the death of ECW, and how the company could have been saved if a few things had broken the right way.

 

 

I don't buy that they had any chance of doing any better doing an afternoon strip on Fox than they did on TNN. Even if they had the money to shoot it, the content was not suitable to an afternoon slot and would have had to be very toned down. For whatever reason, no one wanted to offer ECW a national cable slot in late night where they could have actually done the actual ECW show. And if they didn't have that, they didn't have the distribution they needed to be successful.

 

ECW was about 5-7 years too early in that regard - in 2000, it was a successful niche product that needed national cable distribution to make the money to keep any of their talent. It needed to act like a mainstream product, but it was really a niche one. In 2005 or so, the ability to distribute video content via the internet may have mitigated the need to have that national cable distribution and may have allowed them to make the profits needed to keep at least some of their top guys. And really, an internet TV show, with no censor issues, was abolsutely the right venue for ECW.

[Sidebottom]

But by 2005, the video sales money they badly needed would have turned into illegal downloads.

[jdw]

They wouldn't have made any money off distributing stuff off the net, especially not at levels to keep talent. ROH came after Heyman, "learned" everything they could from his model, cast a net out far and wide for new talent, used "developing technologies"... and never had more than a pot to piss in.

 

John

[Petey]

I don't think the ROH/ECW comparison is 100% apples to apples. ECW, even in 2000 when they were simply trying to avoid dying, were still drawing 2,000/3,000+ at a lot of shows. I think the only time ROH has drawn in that range has been their shows at Hammerstein. That didn't happen until over five years into their existence. I would imagine that 2000 ECW's gates have almost always been larger than ROH's.

 

Whether or not the combination of ECW's larger gates and internet distribution would have allowed ECW to keep things going is debatable, but I'm not sure ROH's "success" is a totally accurate forecast for what ECW would have done.

[jdw]

The reason that ROH and ECW weren't analogous is because Heyman had far more overhead. ROH was run on the cheap. ECW was cheaper than WWF and WCW, but it wasn't cheap.

 

ECW was going to die. The only reason it lasted as long as it did was because Paul was a con man and conned a lot of people out of a lot of money to keep the hand-to-mouth operation of ECW running.

 

edit: were --> weren't

[kjh]

Isn't that the case with most wrestling start ups that strive to be bigger than a small local independent wrestling company? The only reason ROH is alive today is because the people in charge found a succession of increasingly wealthy money marks to invest into / buy the company when the previous one was about to tap out. It's not because it's been a profitable or break-even venture or there was a sound business plan backing it up. Same goes with TNA.