10 Ways WWE Can Be THE Cool Wrestling Company Again
That joke isn't funny anymore.
New Japan Pro Wrestling is the coolest wrestling company on the scene.
A combination of unprecedented ******1/4 critical acclaim, a zeitgeist-grabbing cast of characters, and the turned head of one Chris Jericho have led us to a point at which the company has generated enough momentum to book a 5,300-seat arena for 2018's Long Beach, California show. Eric Bischoff titled his autobiography 'Controversy Creates Cash'. The word 'cool', on the evidence of New Japan's 2017 and WWE's own Attitude Era, could easily be substituted.
WWE, in contrast, isn't cool in 2017. In WWE, babyfaces are irritating rapscallions, not inventive renegades. Heels are trash-talking nuisances, not sociopathic warlords who dole out ungodly punishment to their opponents. Lower card acts are comedy losers who aren't particularly funny, not Young Lions whose furtive steps onto the main stage are meticulously planned to prove their eventual worth. In WWE, interminable promos are horrendously overwritten, and often just horrendous - like James Joyce penning a Rob Schneider vehicle.
New Japan's the Young Bucks have proven that the elusive concept of cool isn't a fringe, cult concern - it's something to be monetised...
10. Throw What Must Be Pennies At Anthem Sports
Impact Wrestling is on its a*se.
Mired in financial woes, with a roster vanishing faster than the company is from the wider wrestling radar, it is surely only a matter of time before the company accepts its inevitable fate. At this point, the only logical explanation behind the company's continued existence is that the Grim Reaper, like most everybody else, has forgotten about it.
If WCW, in 2001, cost a mere $4M - that's $1M less than the WrestleMania 33 rollercoaster - Impact Wrestling must represent chump change. But, despite its current predicament, it wouldn't represent a chump investment; the archive footage alone would entice several new eyes to the WWE Network, and provide excellent source material for several new BluRays covering the marketable careers of AJ Styles, Samoa Joe et al. Procuring Impact and its (debated) intellectual property would also allow WWE to at last step up plans to re-break Matt Hardy's BROKEN universe - the so-bad-it's-good cult sensation WWE has the production budget to writ impossibly large.
Matt isn't the only performer WWE should allow this creative freedom...