2016 TNA General Thread

[mattdangerously]

2 hours ago, Vader does my taxes! said:

That said, the most surprising thing is that Russo is willing to admit to this, years later.  It didn't get off the ground.  If I pitched this as a failed pilot, and no one was the wiser (since it didn't get made), I would not be telling people about this.  That's the last thing I'd be doing.

Yeah, but you're looking at it from your own perspective.  When Russo revealed all of that, he was probably thinking, "Just look at how much better TNA coulda been, bro!"

[Jerome Miller]

That Mike Johnson article is even more fascinating if you look at it as being full of thinly veiled, passive aggressive cheap shots at Bob Ryder over the split between Ryder and Dave Scherer.

[RIPPA]

The rumblings coming from a banned source are that the MYSTERY BUYER~! in the mix is a group called Alliance MMA

[Raziel]

How do you know, he doesn't have a Twitter?

 

Option B: I thought he only had the inside on NXT?

[jstout]

11 minutes ago, RIPPA said:

The rumblings coming from a banned source are that the MYSTERY BUYER~! in the mix is a group called Alliance MMA

That's something I hadn't considered. Could any ol' anybody buy TNA and get their timeslots? Could an MMA group buy TNA and suddenly start showing MMA on Pop, or could Pop say "whoa, nellie" and put a stop to that? You'd think they could. Maybe they only want the overseas deals and would sell the tape library to Vince to help pay for the purchase. Intrigue~!

[Matt D]

13 minutes ago, Raziel403 said:

How do you know, he doesn't have a Twitter?

 

Option B: I thought he only had the inside on NXT?

Inside NXT?

Alliance MMA?

Are you trying to say the mysterious benefactor is Daria Berenato?

[Craig H]

At one point, he followed me on twitter and I never noticed. So I blocked that account. Then I noticed he made or used an additional account, similar name, to follow me again. Fucking weirdo.

[NikoBaltimore]

Random thought, but aside from the names mentioned I'm really hoping Allie/Cherry Bomb gets a shot in a prominent promotion.  She's a great wrestler, is very easy on the eyes and can make a character work.  She can go super annoying with her voice like her heel run or be sympathetic and do both pretty damn well.  If it means bringing Braxton/Pepper into the fold then it's worth it to me.

As far as whoever buys it out, I sense that Friday's going to be very interesting.  I'm hoping for a slow day at work because there can be a lot to go through.

[RIPPA]

1 hour ago, Craig H said:

At one point, he followed me on twitter and I never noticed. So I blocked that account. Then I noticed he made or used an additional account, similar name, to follow me again. Fucking weirdo.

You are thinking of the wrong poster

(Hint: Becky Lynch)

[Craig H]

Oh, for real? Well, he's a weirdo too.

[offspring515]

1 hour ago, Craig H said:

Oh, for real? Well, he's a weirdo too.

No dirtsheet reported that.

[nate]

"Idiots."

ETA: Forgot the quotes.  That almost ended in disaster for me.

[Jerome Miller]

This week's Observer says WWE is out of the picture and Dixie Carter's inept negotiation tactics have completely fucked everything up.

[ChrisM]

Good luck to whoever the buyer is. I hope they like pissing away $4 million. 

[Sublime]

I'm gonna go with no buyer will be found due to whatever Dixie is trying to pull off and TNA folds up quietly and WWE buys the tape library for even less than they offered before.

[RIPPA]

Billy is doing a bunch of media for Bound For Glory including Dan Lebatard today so I could easily see if being Corgan just flushing more money down the toilet and just funding the PPV and tapings again to stall for time because he is an idiot.

[The Natural]

6 hours ago, Jerome Miller said:

This week's Observer says WWE is out of the picture and Dixie Carter's inept negotiation tactics have completely fucked everything up.

Dixie Carter fucked everything up, not a surprise.

[muhammedboehm]

Over/under the way she's f'ing it up is by telling WWE that as part of the deal she has to stay in control of the company and that there has to be an invasion angle on Raw or SD or both lead by her and TNA wrestlers that are all former WWE cast offs. 

[(BP)]

Dixie Carter is Warren Beatty in McCabe & Mrs. Miller. She'll still think she's a brilliant negotiator even when she's financially 

Spoiler

 

[mattdangerously]

Are we sure she's actually trying to sell the company?  She strikes me as being dumb enough to try and string Corgan and the nazis along for as long as possible.  She probably thinks she's being slick as hell to keep it going for this long already.

[JohnnyJ]

i'm guessing she is trying to keep the company operational in some form and pay off creditors while having zero leverage. 

[RIPPA]

From the newest WON

Quote

With Bound for Glory and television tapings scheduled this week, the expectation was that TNA would be sold by now, although that’s been the feeling for weeks and at press time it still hasn’t happened.

This puts the company in a tough position because Dixie Carter is still the majority owner of the company, with 70 percent of the stock, but has no money to fund this coming week’s shows.

This has been the case for every set of tapings going back several months, where in the end, either Aroluxe at first, and Billy Corgan of late, have funded the tapings in exchange for ownership. We’ve also heard word that Fite TV also has a stake in the company.

The shows are all written. The talent has tickets for Orlando. But the money isn’t there to produce the shows, which would be around $600,000. The frustration across the board has grown with fingers pointed across the board at Dixie Carter for making a mess of the sale negotiations.

“There are a lot of hurdles and games being played,” said one person with knowledge of how the sale talks are going. “She (Dixie Carter) has really made a mess and is responsible for all of it.”

Another person following the situation closely with contacts into what is happening said of the sale, “I thought Aroluxe had it late last week (this was when just days earlier Billy Corgan seemed to be the one most expected to get it). Then Saturday (9/24) I thought Billy won. Now I know the same BS is still going back-and-forth. She is something else. I’ve never met someone so clueless. She is out of touch on all levels. Both sides want her out. There is no doubt there. It’s the only thing they can agree on.”

Carter is the one who is going to make the decision who gets the company and they need someone who has the ability to fund it. WWE was said to be back in the picture early in the week, but at press time, they are back out of the picture. Before there was a feeling WWE was a last ditch thing but the feeling now is Carter is going to make the best deal for her, as a WWE deal would end the company as they would only buy it for the tape library, and probably bring some of the contracted talent into WWE.

There’s also the issue of the debt, which is in the millions of dollars, largely to Aroluxe and Corgan but there are other creditors as well. The belief is that WWE wouldn’t assume the debt and that the company would then be closed down. John Gaburick, due to his longtime relationship with Kevin Dunn, was the one who brought the WWE into the picture.

The debt is also a key problem in getting someone else to buy it, because if the company was to continue, who would be there to pick up the debt? In the case of Corgan, and for that matter Aroluxe, to have put money in and the company then folding would mean they’d get little for that investment other than a percentage of the purchase of the tape library. Aroluxe, headed by Jason Brown and former wrestlers Don & Ron Harris, are believed to not want Gaburick around. There is an argument the debt is greater than the value of the company, which makes the sale tricky, or if not, the numbers aren’t far apart.

In many ways, this situation with the timeline and such resemble Eric Bischoff’s scrambling with no time to spare with WCW in 2001. In many ways, Billy Corgan is in the Bischoff role. When Turner Broadcasting decided to cancel wrestling, Bischoff had a deal in principle to buy the company, but also in the purchase was guaranteed TV time (TNT was going to cancel but he’d still have TBS although he didn’t know at the time TNT was going to drop it). With no TV time, the deal was breached and the company was worthless without a television platform. Given the long history of the company and even at its worst, the ratings, while collapsing from two years earlier, were still okay, if Bischoff had enough time, he may have gotten a deal. But he was on a deadline and couldn’t save it.

Similarly with Corgan, with time he may be able to put together the right deal to save TNA, but he may only have a few days left. If there’s no money by 9/30, there will be no PPV on Sunday and no tapings the next week. That would put TNA in breach of its television contracts and PPV contracts to provide the shows and new material. It wouldn’t guarantee death, but it would be a bad thing and it could mean death at that point, or grave consequences if one or more of the television partners used the breach to cancel the show.

The Bischoff story ended with WWE getting all the WCW tape library and intellectual property, and whatever contracts they wanted, for just $2.5 million and a promise to spend $2 million over the next several years in advertising on Turner stations. It was beyond a sweetheart deal and the U.S. industry has never recovered. Similarly, the WWE offer for TNA is low, and while they appear not to be the frontrunners at this moment, with timing of the essence, they may still get it.

There have been past attempts at purchasing TNA, including the 2014 attempt by Toby Keith that would have saved the company most of this hardship, because Spike TV would not likely have dumped TNA if it had new ownership, unless that no ownership was a failure.

The ratings of TNA weren’t that bad, although they were falling, but dealing with Carter had all kinds of issues, the most notable once being how she secretly hired Vince Russo, which Spike wanted nowhere near the product, and then it was exposed when Russo accidentally e-mailed a format to wrestling reporter Mike Johnson that was supposed to go to announcer Mike Tenay. That caused a major day of panic and while it was not the only reason, it was right after that when Spike made the final decision to not renew.

But the Keith deal fell apart because at the time Bob Carter owned the company and his one stipulation was that Dixie Carter remain, even if largely a figurehead, in an executive role. Bob Carter washed his hands of the company some time back.

Of late, Carter has still wanted to save face while the company was going down, although it would be very difficult at this point. Everyone on all sides of this equation has different views of what can be done and what needs to be done, but all are emphatic it was Carter who caused it to get this bad.

Corgan is said to want to run a wrestling company but it’s up in the air if she’ll sell him this one under the terms he wants to buy it. The up side to buying this company is there are in place paying television deals in the U.K., although there are questions about the longevity of that one, and a good deal in India which is probably the biggest current revenue stream. There is also the Pop TV deal, which is good through April (nothing in television is guaranteed but the belief is this deal isn’t in jeopardy until April as long as they fulfill production of new weekly shows) and at least gives the company national exposure, even if the deal doesn’t bring in any real money. It’s that new deal that has led to trouble because the Pop TV deal is worth virtually nothing since Pop pays nothing for the shows and the shared revenue on advertising aspect of the deal has led to TNA getting little if any money.

So they are down several millions from the Destination America deal the year before, and that deal was worth between 40 and 50 percent of what the Spike deal was two years ago, so that’s where the financial problems really started to take hold.

Corgan did an ESPN interview on 9/26. He was in Los Aneles recording a new solo album with Rick Rubin (who was the main financial backer of Smoky Mountain Wrestling in the 90s). He said that his goal is to change the company from one willing to be in the shadows of WWE to one to move out of the shadows, which means trying to attract more sponsors, more talent and do live events, but admits there are no quick fixes.

He claimed there is an idea in the works to do a full-length Hardys movie based on their new characters. He said that wrestling has been living off the innovations done by ECW and attitude era WWE and nobody has innovated much since. He said he wants to personally stay off television as much as possible because he’s better as a heel, but he doesn’t like the heel authority figure in wrestling right now because it’s been done to death and nobody can do it as good as Vince McMahon.

He pushed the idea that he’d like C.M. Punk to come. I don’t see that one happening.

When asked about his attempts to buy the company he called it a very complicated situation with many moving parts but said he has secured the resources to do so and hopes to have a deal put together in the next three weeks. He said his first move would be to change the name from TNA.

Corgan has essentially saved the last two tapings and seems more hands-on regarding control of the company. The product is mostly solid, but they need better than solid right now, they need something to wake people up to what’s going on and while the Matt Hardy situation is definitely over, to the point people chant “Delete” at WWE events (not much but it did happen at Raw last week) and at indie shows (a lot more), it’s only helped somewhat and financially not a lot given there’s no method of making significant money right now past the TV revenue and that’s not enough.

Some fans hoped that Corgan’s appearance on Busted Open Radio on 9/28 would give more answers, but it was clear he was unable to talk about what was going on. He admitted he had paid for the past few sets of television tapings but didn’t sound sure of anything, using “ifs” as qualifiers in a lot of what he said. Corgan is said to want full control, but to do that he’d also have to buy out Aroluxe.

Aroluxe has a battle plan of cutting things back to just a few television tapings per year to keep the product alive.

According to sources, a deal appeared nearly completed on 9/26 but ended up not being finalized.

 

[Technico Support]

17 hours ago, jstout said:

That's something I hadn't considered. Could any ol' anybody buy TNA and get their timeslots?

Now is the time, guys.  Let's pool our money and get apartment wrestling on POP.

[JohnnyJ]

The sticking point is likely that the only guaranteed tv is through April. So lets say you wanted to overpay for TNA to say you own a wrestling company, if pop doesn't renew then you just paid for another version of global force. 

 

 

[BurningBeard]

Every time I see how much WWE paid for WCW I puke a little in a my mouth. Steal of the century.