WWE Hall of Famer and former WCW President Eric Bischoff took on an episode of his 83 Weeks podcast, where he talked about a number of topics including MJF being absent from AEW TV while filming movies.
Bischoff said, “There are two sides of that, and I see both of them. I was in that position a couple of times in WCW, where talent would come to me and say, ‘Hey look, I’ve got a movie. This is a big opportunity.’ And I think, like Tony — it’s probably one thing that we had in common — is I looked for a way to make that happen. You don’t ever want — I would never want — someone working for me that had an opportunity like MJF has to come to me and just shut them down. Say, ‘Sorry man, we need you too much. We’re paying you X amount of money a year. Your first obligation is here.’ Even if it is, even if it’s true, you don’t want to put it that way, because that talent — I’m going to use MJF. And I don’t know MJF real well, right? We stay in touch occasionally via text, but it’s not like I sit down and have long conversations with him. So I don’t know what really makes him tick, right? But if you take somebody like MJF, who obviously has a tremendous amount of talent and ability. We’ve seen it in the ring, and now we’re going to have an opportunity to see it on the big screen. You don’t want to ever tell that talent, ‘No, you can’t do that.’ You’ve got to try to make it work. But business is business. And again, financially it doesn’t matter to Tony. He just doesn’t care. He doesn’t have to care. I wouldn’t care either if I was him. Not knocking him. But the brand is suffering, and finding a way to accommodate an opportunity is one thing. Sending somebody off for 30, 60, 90 days, I don’t know how long MJF is going to be out of the picture. But movie-making is a long process, so depending on how many scenes he’s in, he could be on lockdown for a while now. You’re hurting your brand.”
On MJF needing to stay off AEW TV because of the state of the company:
“Here’s the other side. Now if I was MJF agent or manager, I would tell him stay on that movie set as long as you possibly can. Do not get near an AEW camera until you’re absolutely forced to by court order. Because the more he’s involved in what’s going on in AEW right now, the more his stock is going to go down.”
You can check out the complete podcast in the video below.
(H/T to 411Mania.com for transcribing the above quotes)
