To say that WWE’s overall management and booking of their wrestlers has been lacking lately is an understatement. But the company’s recent management of its talents has deteriorated as both the main event wrestlers and newcomers are feeling the impact.
Mass publishing is not new to the company. Wrestlers who haven’t been on TV for a while because of an injury or because they’re on their way might be on the chopping block. Now, however, the WWE is cutting off established wrestlers who appear on TV week after week and even newly signed wrestlers and clipping their wings before they get wind of it.
The release of 18 wrestlers last Thursday proves that WWE’s booking and management problems leave no wrestler safe, whether they occupy the main event ticket or are newcomers.
This month’s publications saw primeval times golden shovel firmly in the mud on the wasted potential of some of NXT’s best talent, Keith Lee, Karrion Kross and Ember Moon.
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NXT, where much of WWE’s talent built before joining the main lists of the better-known Raw and Smackdown shows, used to be a haven for newer wrestlers to learn the ropes and hone their craft. NXT was baby Paul Levesque, better known for his wrestling personality, Triple H. Under his leadership, what was essentially the WWE Minor League was a major event in its own right. But now that Triple H has stepped down from overseeing the brand, wrestlers he developed for years with long-term storylines and popular gimmicks were repackaged or dumped entirely by WWE CEO Vince McMahon before he even made the main list Has. Behind the scenes, WWE is even more melodramatic than it is on screen.
This year alone, WWE laid off 71 wrestlers corresponding Game spotwhich is enough to make up a full list of talent from all of the other wrestling promotions around the world. In the past, no more than about five names were mentioned in a list that the company published on its website. Now releases are being made en masse.
During the third quarter results conference call on the 4th, they touted WWE’s popularity on TikTok, as newer talent emerged on their rebranded NXT 2.0 show, and even compared their Superstars to Marvel heroes, saying, “Everyone Superhero is its own custom franchise, and WWE has just started unlocking some of our incredible IPs. ”The trio also mentioned capitalizing on the“ immense popularity of NFTs ”with their trading cards and collectibles, but I don’t have enough spoons to get this one Fight garbage fires.
Ultimately, the meeting concluded that the company was making money $ 43.5 million in net income and $ 255.8 million in revenue from tickets, merchandise costs, and pay-per-view SummerSlam this quarter; an increase of 15 percent compared to the result of the previous quarter.
Today’s WWE is more about building local talent than wrestlers who made it big on the indie wrestling scene. corresponding Cultaholic. Since taking over NXT, McMahon and Senior Vice President Bruce Prichard have no longer had to distinguish the brand from the main list.
Rather than letting a wrestler’s personality shine in the ring during storytelling, NXT 2.0 relies on over-produced video packages, camera angles staring at its female wrestlers, and matches that end far too quickly. All of these problems have also appeared on the main shows for the past few years.
Keith Lee and Karrion Kross were wrestlers who were already popular with NXT fans, but by the time they made the main list they were caught in Vince’s rebranding purgatory. Lees cool entrance theme music was taken away, had a shirt thrown on him, and was renamed Keith by chance.Bear cat“Lee. His quiet, eloquent promos, in which he politely but poignantly displayed his verbose vocabulary, would also be a thing of the past. Suddenly he was reduced to the tired, one-dimensional angry black man who frowns as he crushes his opponents.
Kross probably had the worst main roster call in WWE history when he became a solo actor in a gladiator in a Gimp suit alongside his manager and wife Scarlett Bordeaux as the final boss in NXT. That was before another repackaging with a persona that I can only describe Agent 47 of Hitman. Ember Moon had written star power on her with her in-ring ability and her goddess of war mixed with wolf-like aesthetics. But she was overlooked by McMahon and sent back to NXT before she was fired.
Major wrestlers like Nia Jax, who comes from the same wrestling family dynasty as her cousin The Rock (yes, that Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson “) wasn’t sure. Jax was reportedly released for her vaccination status as all WWE wrestlers were advised to get vaccinated but were never told to. corresponding Cultaholic. However, Jax denied the claim on Instagram, saying she wasn’t even aware of her release until it happened.
Aside from Lee, Moon and Jax, many of WWE’s black talent got the boot last Thursday, which is especially frustrating given the promise each of these wrestlers made in the ring.
Notably, Mia Yim, who is also Lee’s fiancée, got booked into a faction called Retribution, WWE’s idea of what Antifa was during the Black Lives Matter protests. It was also canceled this week after spending time in the bank due to a coronavirus infection.
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While I know, or at least hope, that many of the wrestlers released will do better in the long run, my heart is bleeding for those who are still employed by WWE and who probably feel they can’t speak their frustration with how they are run behind the scenes. The knee-jerk reaction to WWE wrestlers losing their jobs may not always be that they will end up with main competitor All Elite Wrestling. While the recent wrestling graduation has proven that they have a better grasp of the management of former WWE wrestlers, they are not a patch for the WWE’s management mistakes.
Change must take place within WWE so that talent not only feels valued, but also feels confident that their work is not being done because of a “necessary” Budget cut demanded at the same rate that the company brags about its revenues.
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