10 Times WWE Booked Themselves Into A Corner
4. Hiring The New World Order
The WWF hired the nWo because the nWo were draws and the WWF wasn't drawing.
Simple economics complicated to a preposterous degree, the WWF made exceptionally hard work of something that was never going to work. Hogan, Nash and Hall were no longer the cool disrupting force of professional wrestling. This could have worked - the act was reoriented with a knowing, meta acknowledgement of their toxic politicking - but this intriguing element was mostly dropped.
The "dose of poison" manifested as an attempt to end the careers of the Rock and Steve Austin, which if successful probably would have proven lethal to the WWF. It effectively did by 2003, as Triple H failed to draw as the tippy-top guy, but in any event, this was standard fare from the men who had revolutionised the industry eight years prior. The semi-truck and breeze-block attacks proved fatalistic, in the end; the attempts to get heat on the nWo were so overblown and farcical that nobody could take them seriously, and fans instead projected their own feelings onto the group.
Those feelings were nostalgia and euphoria, for the megastar they grew idolising had returned, ruining the core idea of the storyline.