What's the status of TKO?

Death, taxes, and corporate suites will ruin pro wrestling.

There are very few things certain in life, but there's enough of a track record to prove that corporate suites don't understand pro wrestling. Ted Turner's World Championship Wrestling went from the highest rated show on cable in 1997 to out of business within the span of three years. The reason is simple, and it can apply to any industry across the board, which is why there's always a fluctuation of business ventures in any field, just because someone has the resources to finance something, that doesn't automatically mean that they have the knowledge to make it successful. In the early-90s, Jim Herd knew how to sell pizza, not pro wrestling. The result of that was a lot of pitiful television, a myriad of talented performers that decided to leave the organization rather than work for him, and a revolving door of figure heads to replace him after he was given his walking papers. 

As I said, this notion applies beyond the scope of professional wrestling.

Bob Chapek was named the CEO of Disney in 2020, replacing longtime kingpin, Bob Iger before he was given the boot two years later after a disastrous earnings report at the time. The former boss returned from retirement, signing a new contract with the understanding that his eventual successor would be put in place at some point in the future. Generally speaking, Disney is such an entertainment powerhouse that prints money that when the conglomerate lost a massive amount of cash, mostly on investments in productions that didn't move the needle for the Disney+ streaming service, the organization returned to the leadership of Iger because much of the modern success of the company was under his leadership. Iger back in the saddle brought a level of confidence back to investors because of his previous track record. At 75, Iger was ready to retire and it was mission accomplished, as far as getting the company in the right direction so Josh D'Amaro was named CEO last month. Panda Energy poured millions of dollars into TNA for more than a decade until Bob Carter pulled the plug on his daughter's vanity project to make herself a TV star. No amount of Bob's cash was going to remove the stain of failure from TNA, and it took the company being sold and rebranded on a few occasions before the audience would give it a chance again. Even a slew of the hand-picked sycophants in the Trump administration were fired recently because they didn't serve the orange blob to the correct degree.

In short, nothing in any business is a substitute for knowledge. That's why the new audio that surfaced of TKO president, Mark Shapiro from a lecture at Alabama University last week should be concerning, both for fans and potentially even those that work for the company.

There was roughly five minutes of muffled audio and some of it was just fancy business jargon, but there were a few key takeaways that provided some insight into how the WWE is run as a part of a conglomerate as opposed to a company on its own. It should be noted that the media muscle and resources behind WWE as a part of Endeavor make it significantly stronger in terms of the business world, specifically when it comes it media rights and distribution negotiations. That being said, it should be noted that while the pro wrestling league is a valuable piece of the Endeavor pie, it's also just one of the entities within the corporation's portfolio. Endeavor has to serve a lot of masters to make the massive amount of money that it does so the pro wrestling side of the coin can't always be the top priority. The downside of that, as we've seen lately, is a rather generic approach that doesn't translate because it uses a macro view to paint with a broad brush rather than attention paid to the small details that collectively make a big difference in the long run.

One of the main points of discussion was that Shapiro confirmed that TKO has creative control over the WWE. On the surface, this might sound like the most concerning portion of the news that made the rounds about the college lecture, but it really shouldn't be that surprising. TKO is the corporation that exists after the merger of the WWE and UFC, which is under the Endeavor umbrella so considering that Endeavor owns the WWE, yes, they would have control over the decisions that are made, at least on a broader level. That being said, it's not so much that Endeavor has creative control, but rather if or when they decide to overrule the decision makers in the WWE for the direction of the product. Keep in mind, Endeavor CEO, Ari Emanuel was supposedly the one that gave Triple H full control of the creative process after Vince McMahon was exiled. It's doubtful that a guy that runs a billion dollar entertainment company that spans beyond the scope of pro wrestling wants to decide what gets booked on Raw each week. That said, there were reports that Emanuel made the call for Pat McAfee's disastrous involvement that actually hindered, not helped the build to WM 42. It was a little too simplistic to expect that just because McAfee has a show on ESPN that booking him into the angle would suddenly cause an upswing in ticket sales when the reasons for the decline in the number of seats sold were expotentially more complicated than who was on television.

Again, the financial resources to fund a company, or in this case, the media power of the Endeavor empire that was used to expand the distribution of the product on a global basis, isn't a substitute for the knowledge of how to build the pay-per-view on a weekly basis.

Speaking of celebrities, Shapiro explained that the corporation values those celebrity tie-ins as a way to draw more mainstream attention, but similar to the booking aspect, every the famous cameos should have a level of nuance to them. It's not anything that will redefine the industry, it's the simple concept that a celebrity appearance will work if it makes sense within the context of pro wrestling and brings something more to the table rather than a superficial grasp at publicity. For example, Mr. T was a perfect fit for Wrestlemania because his roles in the A-Team and Rocky 3 lent themselves very easily to the world of professional wrestling. On the flip side, shoehorning McAfee into the picture, especially with the way his promos trashed the current product, didn't translate to something that would hype the PPV, and neither did the blatant mentions of the storyline on his show. Of course, Shapiro cited The Rock for celebrity involvement as a positive, which means he was sticking to the company line or didn't watch The Rock's involvement last year. More than anything, Dwayne Johnson's most recent tenure in the WWE, as well as some of his recent box office blunders, proved that just giving him a mic or a role doesn't automatically translate to success. The Rock's involvement was random, his promos were rambling, and his abrupt exit before the storyline was resolved with Travis Scott as a replacement was illogical.

Finally, in a round about way, Shapiro said of the price increases and how expensive it is for fans to follow the product now compared to before the merger, if it's too expensive then those fans can stop watching because Endeavor is marketing the brand to a wider demographic that will make up the difference. Maybe that's true, especially with how common international pay-per-views have become, but given that the WWE is still based in the United States, it sounds rather pig-headed for Shapiro to thumb his nose at the domestic audience. Shapiro added that the cost of entertainment options increased so the WWE brand was going to go along with that. That might be the case right now, but there's absolutely no indication that the industry will be able to maintain that in the future, especially with the mergers of the past few years, as well as those on the horizon. There's a reason that ESPN+, Hulu, and Disney+ are all included in the same subscription because trying to sell them as individual platforms wasn't going to be sustainable so Disney made the adjustment to give consumers more for their money. The upcoming Warner Brothers merger with Paramount will ultimately give consumers more content with one subscription. The point is, the economical scale of the entertainment business in the modern era is far from set in stone so it doesn't really provide an excuse for the insane ticket prices beyond corporate greed.

Previously, TKO emphasized the goal of adjusting the WWE ticket prices to be more to scale with the UFC, which as I wrote in an article about the commercialization about Wrestlemania last week, there's somewhat of a crossover with the male demographic, but there are different fan bases. More specifically, part of why the reason that families being able to attend live events was important under Vince McMahon was because professional wrestling fandom was often passed down through the generations. The UFC simply hasn't been around long enough for the generational aspect to apply, hence why it should be a key consideration if families can still afford the WWE product.

While I don't think there will be a mass exodus or a mutiny all at once, the fact that Shapiro acknowledges that the corporation is willing to lose fans in the process of trying to expand internationally, it's at least possible that the TKO business practices could erode the domestic audience over the course of time. That would become a problem if the international expansion doesn't cover the different, especially in terms of revenue. As I also wrote last week, the potential pitfalls might be moot if the overall business plan of TKO is to inflate the value of the WWE before they sell it to the Saudi government within the next decade.