10 Heel Turns That MASSIVELY Backfired

5. Your Midcard Got Russoed

In ‘99, the WCW main event scene had grown incredibly stale, due in no small part to a squad of aging talent, all of whom had contractual creative control and none of whom had any desire to put anyone over. In October of that year, WCW debuted the creative genius of Vince Russo, the man commonly credited with creating WWE’s crash-style Attitude Era programming. 

Russo’s job was to come in and fix all of WCW’s problems, and one of his grand plans involved turning the entire midcard heel as a gigantic uber-stable The New Blood, before pitting them against the Millionaires Club, aka Sting, Ric Flair, DDP, Hogan, aka everyone the fans were tuning in to see. 

Instead of rejuvenating WCW’s tired card hierarchy, the New Blood storyline simply entrenched the Millionaire’s Club in their position at the top of the card, and made the actually talented WCW midcard look like bitter, deluded dorks. At the time, WWE’s midcard was possibly the best it had been at any point in that company’s history, a comparison that further served to extend Raw’s ratings dominance over Nitro.

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4. TNA Becomes Immortal, Slowly Dies

The New World Order was something that started small, brilliant and explosive, before gradually ballooning into a stultifying, multifaceted, product-consuming blob. TNA said, “let’s do that, but FASTER.” 

Hulk Hogan and Eric Bishoff went to TNA in 2010 and began recycling ideas from their WCW heyday in order to turn the ailing ship around. They programmed Impact against Raw in an attempted reboot of the Monday Night Wars that resembled less two titans duelling to the death and more like a summer breeze challenging the Eiffel Tower to a fight. The big plan however, debuted at Bound For Glory 2010, when Jeff Hardy turned heel and along with roughly 60% of the current roster to form Immortal. 

Immortal was basically the nWo but taking the bit where it got boring and too big, and starting there. Jeff Hardy’s antichrist gimmick was pretty good, but he got completely swallowed up in the supergroup. Seeing as he was also TNA’s biggest mainstream draw for casual WWE fans, both ratings and attendance tanked.

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3. The First In A Series Of Unfortunate Goldbergs

WCW in 2000 resembled a million cats in a cardboard box, except the cats were all insane, terrible ideas. The most insane and most terrible idea they had, other than putting the strap on Vince Arquette, was turning Goldberg, WCW’s last true megastar and superhero to many, into a corporate heel.

Say what you will about Goldberg’s capabilities in the ring, but he had been different. He’d had a unique charisma and after a year of horrendous booking across the board, was one of the only dependable assets WCW had left. When he turned heel, he lost that uniqueness, becoming just another unremarkable part of the great blurring carousel of character alignment, incoherent motivation and lack of consequence that plagued WCW in 2000. It was their last great mistake.

• WCW
• Adam Blampied
• heel turns
• wwe

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