Eric Bischoff, who was a huge part of WCW during both the rise and fall of the company recently revealed that he wanted to resurrect WCW after the infamous takeover of WWE on the promotion in 2001.
It is known to almost all the wrestling fans that Vince McMahon wanted to run WCW as a parallel show with WWE. We have talked about it earlier in different stories. But things did not go quite well for WCW during that time and Vince McMahon had to stop the promotion.
Eric Bischoff Wanted To Relaunch WCW?
As an alternative, he started brand split with Raw and Smackdown with Eric Bischoff being a part of Monday Night Raw. There were a lot of theories on why Vince’s plan to run WCW as a parallel show did not work.
The most famous theory has to be, most of the WCW originals were missing in this time period of the run, and WCW fans lost all their interest in the show because of this reason. Of course, there was Booker T, but there was Buff Bagwell too to receive a main event run. Obvious reasons for fans to lose interest in the show.
But a very few know that Eric Bischoff wanted to relaunch WCW and it could be a great deal if his plans worked. During a recent episode of 83 Weeks, Bischoff revealed his plans on the failed project,
I wanted to go dark. I petitioned for the longer we could go dark, the better. But there are some realities there – some cashflow realities that won the argument. I think it was in May, and we were gonna launch on a pay-per-view. My hope was by going dark, the absence makes the heart grow fonder factor would’ve started to kick in. In my opinion, had we stayed dark until the fall, it would’ve been even better but it just wasn’t practical from a cashflow perspective.
And there with issues with TNT and programming. So, the compromise was May. I wanted to do it on pay-per-view, and my reason for it is because we would’ve had sufficient promotional time on TNT promoting that pay-per-view. So, the awareness, the buzz, the energy, the anticipation that we would’ve been able to build promoting it.
By launching on pay-per-view instead of television, I’m not only getting the television promotion I’m gonna get anyway because of the deal we structured, but I’m gonna get all these other opportunities from pay-per-view companies around the United States generating the launch of this new version of WCW.
It was a strategic decision because I thought it would benefit us in the long haul in terms of coverage. Fewer people would’ve watched it, and that was OK. If we had launched on TNT, we would’ve done two and a half or three million viewers.
We would’ve had substantially less than two million viewers on pay-per-view. But the promotion that we would’ve enjoyed on the way to the pay-per-view, and the buzz we would’ve hopefully created at the pay-per-view, we would’ve followed up on the following week on Nitro when we finally did make it to air.
If it worked out, we would have three mainstream shows running at the same time. Something we could not have after the 90s. And if it happened, we question how things would have worked out for TNA as most of the WCW big names preferred TNA back then. They might not have signed for them if WCW was still alive. But these are only theories, and will only remain theories.
Credit: 83 Weeks. H/T 411Mania.