17 Things We Learned From Eric Bischoff On Legends With JBL (Part 1)

8. Cutting Costs And Moving To Disney

When Bischoff took charge he looked to reduce spending with a view to actually turning a profit, something WCW had never done. In fact, it was haemorrhaging money when he took over as WCW couldn't draw a big paying audience, instead attracting pitiful crowds at house shows and papering crowds for TV and PPV. So Bischoff stopped live events and looked at Disney-MGM studios in Florida as a possible new place to tape from. This was met with a lot of resistance from the old timers, Bischoff said, who were also displeased with the lack of house shows. But Bischoff knew he had to cut costs and his initial goal was to get WCW to make a single dollar of profit while he was in charge. He thinks that the narrative of 'Bischoff got given a load of money to kick Vince McMahon's ass' is a convenient narrative but that's not how it was as he spent the first couple of years aggressively cutting costs and implementing new strategies. Bischoff said he earned the budgets that he got in later years by proving his worth in the early days.