10 Wrestling Pay Per View Concepts That Didn't Catch On
3. WWE December To Dismember
For many ECW loyalists, December To Dismember was the night on which the final remains of Paul Heyman’s iconic promotion were laid to rest.
With December To Dismember, Vince McMahon took the last vestiges of ECW’s legacy and threw them straight into the trash. The show featured a seemingly endless stream of low blows against the company, its fans, and Heyman himself.
The ECW revival was always a bad idea, of course. WWE completely sterilised everything that made the original company special, and while One Night Stand 2005 was an excellent idea (and an even better show), December to Dismember was the polar opposite. It was safe, clean, sanitised: everything that ECW wasn’t, and it soon put an end to WWE’s idea of producing more ECW-specific pay-per-views.
The concept of promoting ECW PPVs with a different feel to the product found on Raw and SmackDown was a solid idea - but WWE did nothing to differentiate it from their mainline shows. The ECW brand became “Raw Lite” shortly after debuting, and December to Dismember was the final nail in the coffin. The brand endured, but the ECW PPV concept died almost immediately.
WWE did away with brand-specific pay-per-views entirely a few months later.