10 Times WWE Failed To Replace Wrestlers
4. Stone Cold Steve Austin & The Rock (with Triple H & Anybody)
Stone Cold Steve Austin and The Rock both making gazillions of dollars for WWE at the same time between 1998 and 2001 was the sort dream Vince McMahon couldn't have possibly manifested even before he'd tapped the pop culture he discovered a decade or so earlier.
The prospective gambles of undermining all his Father's territorial agreements or mortgaging everything on WrestleMania were leveraged on Hulk Hogan's broad shoulders. They wouldn't have felt half as hefty with two industry icons doing the heavy lifting instead of one solo star.
All that's to say that 'The Rattlesnake' and 'The Great One' were impossible to just immediately replace, or even replicate when they were both pretty much gone for good in 2003. Triple H pretending he was one of the peers all along was something of a necessity for WWE, but his lousy work and obvious self-serving moves at the time did little to aid the obscuring of the obvious.