I’ve watched wrestling for fun ever since as a child and the business aspects of the industry has always been fascinating to me as I grew up where this is one of those forms of entertainment that blurs the line between reality and fiction. Because they do often talk about the business of running the show where you aren’t really sure how much of it is true this new documentary called “Mr. McMahon” on Netflix was supposed to be the real deal in hearing exactly how the business started and has performed to date.
One of the most interesting business topics from what I have seen thus far is how in the wrestling business there used to be “territories” where each promotion stayed within their own turf while not even thinking of running shows elsewhere as that belongs to say the other business owner. It’s a mutual understanding it seems to maintain the peace I guess you could say.
However, when the owner of the WWE named Vince McMahon decided to seriously get into the wrestling business, he fundamentally had global domination in mind and began to expand into other territories regardless of this industry establish business rule of sort. In his view, it’s a free market and it’s just competition. He even went as far as attracting the best talent from other promotions by offering more money and as evident the WWE become a global phenomenon.
It dives into so many topics such as breaking the rules or simply viewing other people as competition if they are getting in one’s way of making more money. I’m sure most people would say on the outside you should always play nice. But clearly in this example it’s not too uncommon to hear the way many people succeed is to simply takeover as much space as you can even if it means putting others out of business.
There was an example too on how fundamentally the same thing was done to him eventually as another promotion called WCW ended up beating them in the ratings for a long time. But the WWE eventually re-took its crown. I’m still watching the rest of the episodes and these are the kinds of things you can learn a lot about on potential routes to take when you decide to venture on the business route, I think. One thing is for sure, this person went against a lot of the industry norms.