Who Really Killed WCW?

Chapter 5 – The Death of WCW – SUSPECT 5: Jamie Kellner

WCW was a sinking ship, but Ted Turner was far more preoccupied with other business matters.

In January 2000, AOL announced that it wanted to buy Time Warner for an incredible $183 billion. Getting out that inflation calculation, that would be $323.8 billion in today’s money. You could buy 19.6 WWE’s for that sort of money.

Ted Turner was not interested in a merger with AOL, instead pushing for them to buy NBC, but Time Warner’s CEO Gerald Levin saw it a different way.

He saw that AOL was a company that was growing rapidly, and was already worth twice as much as Time Warner was now.

At this rate, just imagine how much it could be worth. Sure hope there aren’t any bubbles around here. Time Warner’s board voted in favour of the merger, with a 45/55 exchange ratio in favour of AOL, and AOL-Time Warner came to be.

In the wake of the AOL-Time Warner merger, the power dynamics within the company began to shift. Turner, who had previously been the Chairperson of Time Warner, became the Vice Chairman of the new conglomerate.

He was unhappy with this, feeling that he was being pushed aside from his own company. He later went on to tell the New Yorker, “Vice Chairman is usually a title to give to someone you can’t figure out what else to do with.”

Before he’d had considerable autonomy over his network and properties like WCW, but now he found that his influence had been significantly reduced in the new corporate structure.

The merger of AOL-Time Warner was completed in February 2000. In March 2000 the dot com bubble burst. Uh oh.

AOL’s stock plummeted, and this led to significant financial strain on the newly merged company, prompting a reassessment of its assets and a shift in corporate priorities. In 2001, the company decided to offload non-core assets to recuperate from its financial troubles.

Now, what do we have around here that is costing us loads of money and isn’t earning anything either? Oh, how about this wrestling company that just lost $62 million?

A chap named Jamie Kellner was made the head of TBS following the merger in 2000 and one thing was quite clear about Kellner: he did not like pro wrestling.

I don’t think he liked much of anything as he also cancelled Batman: The Animated Series, Animaniacs, Pinky & The Brain, Freakazoid, and made Batman Beyond more kid-friendly.

Anyhoo, he was the one who made the call to kill WCW, mostly because the company just lost so much money. As Guy Evans wrote in his book Nitro:

“in the post-merger environment, the new conglomerate was able to ‘write down’ money losing operations, essentially eliminating those losses because of their irrelevancy moving forward.”

Eric Bishoff tried to buy WCW in conjunction with Mandalay Sports Entertainment, and had one request as part of his purchase: they get to keep the timeslots on TNT and TBS. Kellner, who did not want wrestling on TNT or TBS, decided to sell WCW to Vince McMahon and therefore get that wrestling off his networks.

Bishoff would later say on the excellent Monday Night War DVD that without the TV time, WCW was worthless. And that, dear viewers, is how WCW died.

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• eric bischoff
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