Wrestling is losing fans? Is this an issue ?
 

WWE is bad


AEW, new, but not much better


Is there a serious problem here?

wrestling has some major issues. all of which are that kayfabe is dead. there isnt a solution. the marks are dictating too much which creates a too mamy chiefs not enough indians issue thats truly insurmountable.

im not confident there will be a national product in 20 years

They should have gave Russo full creative control all those years ago.

The world will be better off when it dies.

i dont think it will die. i think sites like twitch will allow wrestling pockets to serve larger niche audiences

I agree with Destor on that, I don't think wrestling will ever truly die, it will have a niche audience even if it collapses.

For me the thing that's hurt wrestling the most has been WWE being spread too thin. They are a content-generating company now. Kevin Dunn's production work also makes the programs difficult to watch. WWE can still put on a good ppv but the weekly shows are just not good.

I actually expect WWE to be sold within a few years, for a large amount of money, with a similar structure to what UFC got where current management remains in charge after the sale.

them being publicly traded is going to be a factor when these tv contracts come up and the issue is a suit cant run wrestling. only carnies can.

New Japan has made some really strange decisions since Takami Ohbari replaced Harold Meij as company President, I think largely in part to Ohbari not having a background in wrestling.

njpw has moved to mirror American wrestling with a Japanese coat of paint. its working right now because theyre hot shotting. hot shotting always works for a period but then is followed by droughts. essentially a period of time for a new potential audience to exist that hasnt been exposed to all the angles that they ran through.

that time frame is dependant on exposure.

its where we are in the states right now. we're in a down swing created by the hot shotting on the 90s.

the potential wrestling audience that exists looks back on wrestling fondly from when they were fans and everything was new. it can never be new again.

the issue now is everything is visible and exists forever. its unclear that recovery is possible on a large scale.

my opinion is that it will be but will require a much longer period. im thinking wrestling might get hot again in the 2050s or so but thats only provided it goes away soon enough for that to happen.

at the end of the day wrestling is athletic theater. theater will never die. it just needs to be fresh and it cant be that right now. there are no new stories to tell. they simply dont exist.

over a long enough timeline old becomes new. thats where we are imo.

I think it is like everything else on TV now, it's all for a niche audience. It's main advantage is the same as sports, it is live. As long as there is enough of a niche audience, it will be around.

I think that the TV Networks and Streaming providers need for content with a fan base has changed the game. We can see that if you have over 500k or so people who watch weekly you are a desired content provider. I think at this point that the buisness of ad sales is kind of a con for the tv networks. Until the sponsors find a better use for big dollar advertising at least.

Wrestling will have a fervent fan base for the rest of our lives, but will it ever grow to a new generation? That may be a struggle if AEW and WWE aren't able to hook a new generation of fans.

Also want to say that taste in a generation is a big deal. Wrestling lost a lot of fans when WWF was the biggest game in town and took out certain territories. Of course a lot of fans moved over to WWF but not all. There were those stalwarts of a certain time and style in wrestling.

The same thing is happening now. Taker Gertner or Noid or many other posters here who have completely stopped watching. The new style isn't for them. It's not what the connected to in the old days. That's kind of a natural progression of the cycle in wrestling as years go on.

The big thing is that something has to hook a young generation of fans so they grow up obsessed with Wrestling the way we did.

For me personally (a lifelong fan) it has just become stale. Perhaps that is a negative byproduct of me watching so much, I can predict most of it.


That, the constant non-finishes, the "guy goes over before a big PPV title shot only to lose said title shot" shit is old. The camera work also, sucks big floppy donkey dong.


I dunno why, but I find AEW entertaining for the most part for now. Far from perfect, but they keep my attention more right now *shrug*

The camera work is a massive issue and why I don't check things out from time to time. I don't hate on the current product. It seems like the PPV matches are always great, it just doesn't interest me anymore.

That wrestling is alive now is owed entirely to the product we loved in the past.

Wrestling will die, it just depends on when Jericho retires and WWE gets found out for trading on speculation.

My rassling show these days would be a weekly 30 minute max show and feature no wrestling. Just promos, video packages, and angles. Every segment of which will be broken up and posted on social medias.

Then either bimonthly or quarterly there would be an actual rassling show to pay stuff off.

I'd watch that. I pretty much only watch PPV at this point (for WWE) so I only see the video packages and the matches anyway.

Lock Jaw peering into the future of WWE.

No one has the attention span or desire to watch a weekly rassling show anymore other than the hardcore marks

There are a lot of issues. Destor covered the big ones. Kayfabe being dead is huge. There’s no integrity behind anything anymore. What are the reasons for belts, matches and to do any of this at all if the context of conflict has been thrown out?

Losing fans is an issue, but it might actually be better to burn the whole fucking forest down and let it grow anew. Maybe at some point some cool kids whose parents hated the fuck out of wrestling will catch wind of something that strikes an authentic emotional chord with them and wrestling will come back to life in a few generations or so?

The only immediate hope I have is another rich billionaire identifying the gap in the market for some wrestling that isn’t too self-conscious to tell an honest story and genuinely try to work people. There are openings there for a good wrestling show with relative stars that is actually priority viewing. But I’m losing hope.

The more I think about it the more I think that the general shift in pop culture has really hurt the popularity of wrestling. What I mean is that, during the 90's, wrestling was peak programming, especially for kids, in terms of wanting something edgy. You had violence and swearing and things were sexualized and it was wild.

Now I'm not suggesting a return to that attitude era style program would fix WWE. Quite the contrary. I think what happened is that everything else on TV has gotten so edgy at this point that the things that made wrestling stick out to people are just the norm now. There are tons of programs that fill that niche that wrestling was uniquely suited to during that boom in the mid/late 90's. And while everything else seems to get edgier, WWE has been going the other way. They no longer have that same spark and even if they did they'd just be lost in the sea of everything else now.

It's also just plain stale too. Over the 30 years I've watched wrestling, they've done all the angles to death. There are only so many ways you can spin the same kinda scenarios before they are just done and need to be locked away for awhile until they can be fresh again. But with as much content as they have produced I understand why this has happened and don't think it was some intentional thing. Creative literally has just hit the wall. We need entirely new angles and scenarios and what not to freshen things up. Something that doesn't feel like we've seen it a hundred times before. I dunno what that story is but someone out there has to be able to figure it out and come up with something that will work. I think maybe LU was onto something in this regard. Would have been interested to see where they would have went had they had the recognition and budget of a company like WWE.

I think the staleness factor is why a lot of people gravitate to kooky shit like Bray Wyatt, Broken Matt Hardy, even an Orange Cassidy. Not all of it is good, and some of it is downright awful. But it's new and it's wildly different. You have no idea what kinda craziness they'll do next and that draws people in.

That stuff doesn’t draw people in though. Matt Hardy has never been a draw outside The Hardy Boyz. Bray Wyatt has never done big business outside merchandise occasionally. Maybe Bray wasn’t in the position to, but we’re talking about a shrivelling fanbase that still has time for this shit. When other wrestling fans reaffirm that this is “good shit” it’s just confirmation bias rearing its ugly head.

Wrestling fans think the stuff they talk about on the internet is over. The Bullet Club, Matt Hardy, Bray Wyatt, Kenny Omega, New Japan, AEW, Braun Strowman, etc. They really don’t mean shit to anyone with a healthily general relationship to wrestling content.

@seph wrestling has been massively successful being kid friendly though. being edgy was a big factor in the 90s but clearly not in the 80s.

Edgy is outdated as fuck. It doesn’t age well. The new edgy is being confident enough to not need to rely on shock factor in lieu of a personality.

Wrestling biggest boom periods followed massive cultural shifts. Both tied directly to music. In the 80's it was MTV and the Rock N' Wrestling Era. ECW, and subsequently WWF's Attitude Era was built off the grunge movement of the mid 90's.

So modern day, over-produced, 1000-camera cuts a minute wrestling = EDM

WWE just simply has too much content to keep up with and the content on the 2 main shows is brutal. They also have dicked themselves by refusing to pull the trigger on countless guys when it’s their time to be on top of the card. I believe WWE’s philosophy is to make it like the circus and you come for the whole show over just 1 main attraction. It works to a degree in that I’d pay to go to a live event but watching 5+ hours every week is too much commitment even if it’s good programming. I can’t remember the last time I sat down and watched an entire RAW and didn’t fall asleep or lose interest and just pull up something on YouTube. Hell, I don’t even keep up with AEW either. AEW has never gotten me interested enough to pay for a PPV though. YouTube clips and review videos pretty much fill me in on storylines. There just aren’t any characters that glue to me to the TV.

I pretty much just watch the WWE PPVs now and have done that for awhile since the matches are usually pretty good now. I know the pandemic hasn’t helped with this either though since the no-crowd shows were awkward and brutal to watch and the Thunderdome/piped in crowd noise isn’t much better. The WWE Network and YouTube are pretty much the only reason I’m still plugged into wrestling enough to post here once in a blue moon.

Hopefully WWE can spark a couple of new hot babyfaces once live events start back up.

I mean as far as WWE goes, it's really just RAW that's egregiously awful week after week. I find NXT and SmackDown! perfectly serviceable, and the PPVs, while underwhelming more often than not are still usually at least a quarter-step up from RAW.

That being said, the rumor of Vince looking to sell WWE due to his vision being almost completely fulfilled or whatever, makes me seriously question whether he's starting to get low on money again. I mean, I know there was the FOX deal for SD a couple of years ago, but who knows how much of that has already been used up. If it's true, I hope he sells to someone that actually knows and cares about the business.

NXT is boring and Raw has got the problem of being pablum for three hours. They sell shorter versions internationally as well as the full versions, so more money for them. SmackDown is the best wrestling show on television, and it feels dirty to say that.

Of all the hype & praise that the "Attitude Era" gets, I can honestly say, I hated it. From a wrestling stand point, it really doesn't measure up to periods before it and after it. HOWEVER, the one thing the "Attitude Era' has that just isn't alive any more is very simple, memorable moments.

The number of top notch matches that took place from 1998-2001 can probably be counted on one hand. Not all wrestling was bad, but the wrestling wasn't the priority. It was the who-can-top-this which led to all of those memorable moments. It is much easier for me to recall the DX/Nation skit versus any top match HHH or The Rock had during that time. I can very easily give you a number of HHH matches that I thought were very good several years later.

One of the biggest issues with the lack of memorable moments is all of this political correctness crap that has been making the rounds these last several years. We are talking about fictitiously scripted programming with planned and choreographed violence and we have to make sure "this person doesn't get their feelings hurt and that person doesn't get offended." When both companies start to throw caution to the wind, use some originality, have talent make something of their characters and feuds and get people talking about memorable moments again, the audience will return. They lost the audience because there is nothing out there worth remembering.

People poo-poo the in-ring content of the Attitude era, but I’d honestly take it over most modern stuff because it just feels a whole lot more organic. There was this element of improv to it. Give me 4 minutes with 2 guys calling it in the ring over 14 with 2 guys who need to plan everything out ahead of time any day.

And you don’t need to be risqué to deliver great moments. A lot of the specifics of the Attitude era don’t hold up because they feel really immature. It’s more about something you can at least will yourself into believing is half-way authentic, even if it’s a real guy playing a stupid wrestling character so he has a job. Good booking and building logical pay-offs to stories with guys who have the skills to be stars helps too.

I agree. I was watching a Raw from late 97 a few months back and was honestly kind of blown away by a DOA vs Los Borriquas match. It's just 5 minutes of hard realistic action. A match that I probably rolled my eyes at at the time but after years of flip flop and fly I definitely miss the days of big dudes with territory experience. Ron and Don also had some awesome Brodyesque brawls in early ECW that I watched recently.

The big difference I see between now and then attitude era is size. A guy like Val Venis would be a monster if he was in that physique today. But then he was not quite a heavyweight in my eyes.

Throwback match recommendation Val Venis vs Rikishi cage match Fully Loaded 2000.

Literally anything with Savio Vega was great. Guy has been massively underappreciated over the years.

Thank you, will sig
 

:cool:

Can’t attest to the DOA/Bariquas stuff specifically, but that’s the sort of thing I find. I’ll go back and watch Bob Holly vs. Al Snow or some shit, and I’ll enjoy it way more than the 20 minute white noise matches you see today.

I grew to love Val Venis during his Heat years. If the guy didn’t turn out to be a total cunt, it would have been nice to see the guy reach the heights they were trying to push him to as a heel in late ‘99/‘00. But the dude was let down by the gimmick and being green when it came to having instincts. He developed into a better worker way after the pushes stopped coming. That Cage Match was basically the splash from the top, in retrospect.

I no longer take my rasslin serious anymore. I wouldn't tape smackdown either. It's terrible. Rather have covid again than watch Raw. Smile lost :(

I find podcasts about wrestling more interesting than wrestling. I’ll listen to 3 hours of two guys reviewing a PPV from 1999 before I engage with this modern shit.