12 Times Vince McMahon's Plans Blew Up In His Face

4. Everything Besides Wrestling

Vince McMahon is the world's most successful wrestling promoter, but he's always wanted to be known as anything else. For decades, McMahon has taken on side projects with the intent of forcing the world to see him as more than a wrestling carny, but they've uniformly failed. McMahon established the World Bodybuilding Federation in 1990, and unsurprisingly, that was an even tougher sell than wrestling. He tried to follow up by selling a bodybuilding supplement, Icopro, but that was also a flop. Even as WWE became increasingly popular, side projects like the WWF Hotel and Casino and WWF New York (the company's Times Square-based restaurant) failed to take off. In the 2000s, McMahon launched WWE Studios, which to date has churned out several money-losing films and barely any profitable ones. The king of McMahon's failed endeavors, though, is the XFL, a football organization designed to compete with the National Football League. The XFL was born in 1999, and though it opened with fanfare and huge ratings, by the end of the single eight-week season in 2001, it was setting record network lows on NBC. The league was forced to close, with WWE and NBC each sustaining a $35 million loss.