WWE Hall of Famer Eric Bischoff recently spoke on his podcast, “83 Weeks,” about a variety of professional wrestling topics including how to bring more interest to the Ring of Honor brand:
“It was a bad decision to buy it in the first place and there’s nothing anybody’s going to do to make it interesting or important outside of the hardest of hardcore internet wrestling community fans. That’s it. There is no solution. If it was a horse, I’d put it out of its misery and move on. I would take the resources that are going into Ring of Honor which is never going to be viable, ever,”
“I would take the resources that are being dumped into that and put it into my core product, Dynamite. By putting Bryan Danielson and the rest of the people that they put into this thing, you’re diluting their characters. You’re making them look like independent wrestlers. You’re not elevating their characters in any way, shape or form. In fact, you’re doing exactly the opposite. It’s really unbelievable to me. I don’t know what the drive is. Is it ego? Is Tony just like, I did this and I’m gonna prove I can make it work? It’s certainly not because it’s a great revenue opportunity. it dilutes the core product. It’s being shoved down the audience’s throat and they’re gagging on it. They’re gagging on it. AEW did what, 850,000 viewers with Christian and Edge last week after they did their best to build it up and that’s all you can bring in? You gotta ask yourself why? It’s a really powerful word, why? Why aren’t fans spending more time with the AEW product? Why is Dynamite unable to break a million viewers more than once or twice or three times a year? What is it about this brand? It’s the product. It’s the way characters are being developed or not being developed. Its focus, its vision, it’s a lot of things, but Ring of Honor is just a distraction and it dilutes the core business. It dilutes the characters that are part of it. It’s almost embarrassing to me that it’s happening. I don’t understand it at all. I hope it works. I hope a year from now you can go,’ Remember when you said’, and I’d have to admit that I was wrong, but so far when it comes to AEW, I’ve been right far more often than I’ve been wrong and I said for two years, just focus on the core product. Focus on Dynamite, not all of these other shows. You don’t have the creative infrastructure or a formula or a vision that’s working. So if you don’t have a formula or vision that’s working and you don’t see any kind of upward growth in your product, why would you expand it?”
“I don’t want to hear about the money because I hear Dave Meltzer talking about the gross. Gross doesn’t meet sh*t. You know that Conrad. I don’t care what the company’s gross revenues are. That’s such horsesh*t. Net revenues, yeah.”
You can check out the complete podcast below:
(h/t to WrestlingNews.co for the transcription)
