WWE Hall of Famer and former WCW President Eric Bischoff took to an episode of his Strictly Business podcast, where he talked about a number of topics including the appeal for WWE to bring CM Punk back in the company following reports of Punk’s departure from AEW and talks with WWE.
Bischoff said, “Not meaningless because he kept to himself. Look, he was and he was the focus. They were building the company around him. So clearly, no one in their right mind would say it was meaningless. But in terms of value, I think everybody knew who CM Punk was before he went to. AEW: It’s not like he introduced himself to a new audience. I think if there’s any added value, it would simply be the controversy. And also, and I think this was inherent in his initial, you know, debut in there’s an inherent curiosity. And we saw that in the ratings, the first-night Punk showed up. And then it dropped off substantially afterward and never rebounded. That was what I was referring to: if you’re going to get a lot of people going to tune in just to see, hey, what is this going to be and is it going to be something exciting? And if it is, they’ll stick around. And if it’s not? They won’t, right? That’s the nature of the product. It’s the nature of everything. So when you go to a restaurant the first time it opens up, and you read about it, and you hear about it, you can’t wait to go and check it out. If the food’s great, you’re going to come back. If it’s mediocre, it doesn’t meet your expectations because they were too high. You probably won’t come back. Or if you do, it’ll be occasional. And that’s exactly what happened, in my opinion, with punk. And there was this tremendous amount of fanfare. There was a lot of anticipation and what the audience saw after the first time out or two. Yeah, but it didn’t it didn’t convert to viewership. It exploited the natural curiosity of the wrestling fan. And probably in some respects a positive way, but it wasn’t reflected in attendance or television ratings. Probably sold a lot of T-shirts. So if that’s a metric you’re basing your business model around, then yay. But it didn’t really have much of an impact. They did. Not nearly the amount that was anticipated. It didn’t live up to the and perhaps unfair expectations because there’s not one guy that you can bring in that is going to significantly move the needle. This is not. And. Creatively, I don’t really think they made it to second base with punk creatively. Did he have great matches for those people who love great matches? Okay, great. You can say he did. I won’t disagree with that. I didn’t watch enough of his matches or was impressed enough with his matches to comment on it. The ones I did see and the characters that I saw left me. Uninspired. It was not bad, but it was not what it was made out to be. And I think it did live up to a lot of unrealistic expectations that the audience naturally is going to have when a big name or a name they haven’t seen in a long time shows up.”
You can check out Bischoff’s complete podcast in the video below.
