9 Times WWE Turned Treasure Into TRASH
2. Any WCW Integration
After a wrestling war that defined a decade, most people assumed that WWF Vs WCW was the one unicorn of a storyline too perfect-by-default to fail, under any circumstances.
Most people were wrong.
It was the sort of thing that was probably always going to be harder to pull off in practice than in endless fantasy booking threads dating back to the earliest days of the Internet Wrestling Community, but when the Invasion pay-per-view alone drew a record-setting buyrate for a B-show, the proof existed that audience desire to even know how it might work was something not to be squandered.
Squander it they did though, and in the 25+ years since the rotten experience of watching WWE midcarders battle "Alliance" heels multiple times a night, there's been much written about exactly how it all went so wrong. Timing, even more so than the incompetence, arrogance, and frugality of the situation, might have worked against it for the off.
Having purchased the company for a meagre $2.5 million (rising to approximately $4.3 million with eventual additional costs) in 2001, Vince McMahon couldn't get the brand a television deal, nor did he wish to spend more money on the biggest Time Warner contracts lest he upset his existing WWE pay structure. The WCW lower card were the best of what remained of a dead brand, failed when called upon to be seen as real threats, and were subsequently given creative even worse than the business-killing dreck they'd endured on the average edition of Nitro.
By the summer, virtually the entire crop of doomed geeks spent their nights avoiding beatings from their boss Stone Cold Steve Austin, in segments that felt as much about the real Vince get his frustrations out on a concept he'd always liked much less than the average fan. Within years of folding it all up, he'd brought in Hulk Hogan, Kevin Nash, Scott Hall, Bill Goldberg, Scott Steiner and others, but by then, the concept of forming a genuine challenger brand from within the WWE system was deemed long dead.
Until a decade and a half later, when Triple H took a different tact...