Well, that was fast!
So their options now are to tape on the road (too expensive) or find another home base soundstage to tape for extended periods of time.
Is the fat lady warming up or will they find some solution to this quickly impending problem?
The level of basic incompetence with this company continues to astound me. I guess they can always try for the ECW Arena or move back to the Asylum, but options are running out fast. Plus you know that with the WWE TV negotiations upcoming and Spike being in the running that Vince wouldn't be above getting them thrown off the station just to fuck with them. I had heard Vegas as the other option when Dave was discussing it a few weeks back, but apparently it's cost-prohibitive. Back to the Nashville Fairgrounds, I guess.
Step One: Move to Northeast ..i.e. Hammerstein or Manhattan Center
ReplyDeleteStep Two: Get OFF Spike and move to FXX or FX.
Step Three: Grab 8-10 ROH/PWG Indy guys
Step Four: Hire someone that can book. Heck even throw a bunch of cash at Jim Ross.
Step Five: Still get 1.0 ratings.
Go to New York. Even if the show sucks, that crowd should still be entertaining.
ReplyDeleteHammerstein would be awesome but I doubt they can get a permanent spot there.
ReplyDeleteOutdoors at warm-weather festivals! Make it Road Wild everyday!
ReplyDelete...And hire me! I work cheap!
Do they still have the giant screens, sets, and Pyro? You'd think a company bleeding money would lose that stuff first.
ReplyDeleteMaybe now they'll just have shows in Dixie's backyard.
ReplyDeleteHammerstein is generally pretty expensive. There's a reason ROH only runs it like a few times a year at most. New York audiences are also really fickle. I'd even say that the Northeast is oversaturated. You could probably run the old ECW arena or another Philly venue since no one has a real lock on the city anymore, what with ROH "expanding" into Baltimore and CZW being more of a Delaware thing, but even then there are still small indys running the city on a regular basis.
ReplyDeleteTry a city like Chicago. It's a travel hub so it shouldn't be too expensive and the crowds are always hot. Resistance Pro and AAW aren't really much of a thing, so there isn't much competition.
Is it at all possible for ROH to somehow end up on Spike?
ReplyDeleteTenay: "Oh my god Tazz, what is Impact wrestling doing in Dixieland!?"
ReplyDeleteI'll lend them my basement for free if they want it?
ReplyDeleteThere are probably a million spots up and down the East Coast they can run. Hell, in New Jersey alone they can probably get a good deal since all the shore towns are trying to get their tourism numbers back up after Hurricane Sandy. They've done Asbury Park already. I can't imagine Atlantic City being all that tough to run. I'm pretty sure the city is still on the hook for the bill for the Revel casino, which hoped to attract more upscale consumers and isn't doing anywhere close to the numbers projected by whoever suckered the city into letting them build it (almost positive it's not a Trump property), so anything that brings a younger crowd there would be a good thing.
ReplyDeleteManhattan Center (Hammerstein and Grand Ballroom) is very expensive to run. It's not really feasible for TNA to run shows there every couple of weeks. And really, most New York venues in general are really expensive.
ReplyDeleteJersey and Philly are probably more likely spots.
I don't think Jim Ross would be willing to potentially burn his bridges with WWE to work for a company that's probably gonna go under sooner than later. And even if he would, although he's been a good evaluator of talent, I'm not positive he'd be able to turn the company around.
Vegas? Old Vegas maybe. There's no way they'd get anywhere on the Strip. Even the Riviera (home of GLOW back in the day) is being surrounded by more upscale casinos and condos.
ReplyDeleteGotta say an outdoor TNA show on Fremont Street would be fun to watch
is just giving up the smartest move they can do at this point?
ReplyDeleteVance Middle School FTW! Hillbilly fans and free school lunches, you cant go wrong with that.
ReplyDeleteI wouldn't do that if I were you. I offered a porn production to do the same thing, didn't end well as it was gay porn.
ReplyDeleteDon't say it's over yet. Whatever else about this company, you have to admire their amazing ability to survive when logically, they should have gone out of business years ago.
ReplyDeleteThe issue isn't finding a place to run, that's easy. The main consideration is that the city can't be too expensive to fly talent into/out of. That's why Vegas isn't an option. They probably could work a deal out, but they have cold feet because it's one of the most expensive tourist destinations in the country.
ReplyDeleteThe other thing to consider is that they'd probably like a spot that has tourists due to the fact that they have to run the same venue on a recurring basis. People get burnt out on something like that except for a few diehards. We joke about TNA not being able to sell out the Impact Zone, but I don't think WWE could even sell out one venue consistently if they ran it every week. They actually couldn't when they used to run shows out of the Manhattan Center in the '90s because that's a ridiculously hard thing to do. So they need a city that has a ton of warm bodies wandering aimlessly that they can pull off the streets to paper the crowd. That's why Universal Studios was actually ideal for the company.
'Step One: Move to Northeast ..i.e. Hammerstein'
ReplyDelete"if tna shows up, we riot"
Could tape a months worth of shows in one day that way they'd only have to book the place 12 times a year.
ReplyDelete2014 TNA:
ReplyDeleteEVERYTHING IS FINE, DAMMIT!!!
Lol no.
ReplyDeleteAND IT WILL ALWAYS BE FINE!
ReplyDeleteIncluding minimal pre-show and post-show nonsense, that's 4 1/2 hours of wrestling at a minimum. It'd be more like 5 hours when you factor in stuff like give-aways and JB shredding his throat trying to keep that crowd alive. Do you really think most of that crowd is going to stick around, and if they do, imagine how brutal that last hour and a half would be.
ReplyDeleteWith an apparently bottomless well of tax writeoff cash to play with, they're...in the money for as long as PANDA deem fit.
ReplyDeleteYa know it just absolutely sucks that TNA just can't become an alternative. At certain times the roster was stacked, they had a real nice tv time slot with full support from Spike TV, and had at least some financial backing. What in the blue hell happened? Where, when & what were their legit, costly missteps? I just don't understand. Although TNA has made it through worse situations, I feel like this may be the final dagger. Go the Sinclaire route like ROH and end up on basic cable? TNA seems much bigger internationally, can they survive with what they do internationally?
ReplyDeleteR.I.P. TNA
If Panda Energy were smart, then they wouldn't have bought TNA in the first place.
ReplyDeleteAin't no such thing as gay money. Money is money.
ReplyDeleteDefinitely no expert on TNA, but it has to be the Hogan regime that brought them down to this level. They probably couldve survived for a long time doing what they were doing pre-Hogan. Hulk came in and everything he pushed them to do ended up costing tons of money with no return on that investment.
ReplyDeleteI cannot believe TNA can't find a place in Vegas to run, but failing that they could possibly run out of Chicago. Chicago has got a huge indy scene.
ReplyDeleteBook the venue for two days a month then. Week 1 (tape Week 1 and 2) and Week 3 (tape week 3 and 4). It would be like the regular road tapings then.
ReplyDeleteThey should rotate buildings:
ReplyDeleteHammerstein
ECW arena
The Asylum
Armory in Tampa.
They can film the next Knockouts PPV in my basement if I get production credits.
ReplyDeleteECW had traditionally done well in Asbury at Convention Hall. If TNA has headquarters in Nashville they should have built a soundstage to cover for this.
ReplyDeleteWell the offer was to use my basement in return for a blowjob from one of the porn stars. I still collected but it wasn't as fun as I thought it would be.
ReplyDeleteYeah. Listening to Hogan fucked them up. Too bad they can't contact TBS and get a timeslot and a soundstage in ATL.
ReplyDeleteIf TNA was smart, they wouldn't have brought Hogan and his friends in in the first place.
ReplyDeleteAs cheap as Magoonie.
ReplyDeleteMake it live while they're at it.
ReplyDeleteTheir biggest problem was that they are not WWE.
ReplyDeleteWhat about Puerto Rico?
ReplyDeleteLogically they should have turned revenue from being on TV in over 20 countries into some kind of financial stability. Seriously how can they look like they're on life support every year? Its not like they are funded by Smart Mark Video DVD sales.
ReplyDeleteThey lost AJ instead.
ReplyDeleteThis news coupled with stuff like this
ReplyDeletehttps://mobile.twitter.com/ringofhonor/statuses/414565372751527937?screen_name=ringofhonor
The writings got to be all over the wall.
You want them to get killed?
ReplyDeleteI went to one of their Base-Brawls in Brooklyn last summer. The stadium was barely half full and filled with people cheering for the WWE the whole night.
ReplyDeleteThey'd probably have to be pretty careful where in NYC they ran.
They said on 411 that TNA did good numbers in the NY area. I also went to the Basebrawl event in Coney Island last year and the bleachers were 3/4 full. You sat far away and wouldn't let us on the field.
ReplyDeleteGive Raven a shot to book already.
ReplyDeleteYou got a better way to cut expenses?
ReplyDeleteNone of those places rotate.
ReplyDeleteHow about the revolving restaurant down the road at Epcot?
If the Jarretts were smart, they would have sold the company to some suckers for a profit.
ReplyDeleteMan there must be something wrong with me, I cannot do like, pay money for sexiness thing ever. Even strip clubs I'm like bleh.
ReplyDeleteThings are gonna turn around for TNA next wek:
ReplyDeletehttps://fbcdn-sphotos-e-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-prn1/p403x403/1551758_10151901016007734_2019034043_n.jpg
The issue of TNA is that from the beginning, whoever's in charge (be it Jarrett, Russo, Hogan, Dixie, whoever) has operated under the delusion they're keeping Vince McMahon awake at night when the truth is WWE barely acknowledges TNA exists. They've tried time and again to leap before they're ready from big signings of ex-WWE guys like Angle, Christian, Booker and more to the new Monday Night Wars where they got their asses royally kicked yet insist they're doing great. But in the last year, after building up stuff with "Gut Check" and things, they've sliced down their roster, gutted the once-great Knockouts and tag divisions and still trying for stuff like Magnus as a main event star and Dixie as the evil owner. The Hogan tenure was the worst as Hogan made himself the show despite all the other talent around and what opportunites they had (Roode, Storm, Aries) were squandered for crap like "Aces & Eights" and continuing to give Jeff Hardy title runs. Not saying pull the plug totally as they're fought back before but still has to be the wake-up call to the faithful of how much trouble they're in.
ReplyDeleteThis cannot be good
ReplyDeleteJust film it from jerry Jarrett's back yard!
ReplyDeleteThey can run in front of an empty theatre at Mr. Burns' house. Sure, Monty will yell at them that the production should have moved out weeks ago, but his son Larry will say that they're alright!
ReplyDeleteWhether it's money or some other medium, you always pay for sexiness.
ReplyDeleteThere's no way Dixie can afford $35 a person for all you can eat dinners.
ReplyDeleteSigning ex-WWE guys didn't work for TNA like it did for WCW was because WWE has done a great job in recent years at getting people to believe that WWE is the star, not any of the names (save for John Cena) that are working the show.
ReplyDeleteIt doesn't help that TNA was rarely good enough for any stretch of time to ever generate an organic groundswell of support. Even when TNA was on a good run a couple of years ago with the Aries title chase and win, it still wasn't anything more than a 'decent' show. That's fine when wrestling is booming, but it's not gonna get WWE fans to crossover or old fans who have tuned out to start watching. Same with when Samoa Joe first came in after TNA left Fox Sports Net but before joining Spike. It was good but was internet only.
At this point, the TNA brand is so damaged it's just not worth continuing on like this. They'd be better off rebooting everything. Change everything that could be traced back to TNA. The name, the graphics, the stage, everything. Do that and hope you hit a prolonged streak of decent booking and MAYBE the company would be able to slowly grow. But I doubt that happens.
Hmm, that would make his theme feel more appropriate.
ReplyDeleteCouldn't they cover the tab by acting as background characters in Living With The Land?
ReplyDeleteAs a WDW veteran, that made me laugh so hard. I now want to see them acting as meet and greet characters.
ReplyDeleteCome to think of it, one of my dreams that I would like to see is a Royal Rumble with nothing but people in the Disney parks character costumes.
This made me think of something that happened in TNA once, I can't find the video anywhere though.
ReplyDeleteSomebody associated with TNA needs to sit down, watch a metric fuck ton of old NWA tapes, and then just fucking copy it! And I mean that seriously: TNA keeps fucking around trying to be WWE lite when a) they blow wrinkled balls at it and b) anyone who wants to watch the WWE is...going to watch WWE! I'm not just saying this because I'm more of an NWA/WCW 'rasslin fan than a WWE sports entertainment fan: TNA needs to focus on being a real alternative program and carve out a niche audience that will at least allow them to stay afloat financially based on that.
ReplyDeleteA good example is these PPV-esque shows they're promoting on Spike. They're just episodes of Impact with different graphics! You get three matches, give or take, and then they fill the rest of it with shitty, meaningless, skits and Dixie Carter angles. For fuck's sake, watch some old Clash of the Champions tapes, then figure out how to translate your shit to an actually meaningful two hour television show with good, important matches and shit actually happening! Will it save them? I don't know, but it seems like this is about their only hope to me.
TNAs not a piece of fruit!
ReplyDeleteSo, basically Jeff Hardy is going to be the surprise #2 entrant in the Royal Rumble, that's what you're telling me.
ReplyDeleteThe NWA is a zombie. Why should anybody copy what losers did 30 years ago?
ReplyDeleteBecause they made money and were a financially secure company (I'm thinking WCW specifically here) for a long time.
ReplyDeleteFrom the numbers I've found, TNA lost millions of dollars from cutting their PPV's. Whoever thought that was a good idea should really have been fired, because they're numbers don't fluctuate wildly. There weren't a huge number of fickle buyer's out there.
ReplyDeleteThis is awful. If I gave a shit about TNA, I might even be upset.
ReplyDeleteBecause although the NWA died, a lot of people have really fond memories of them. Just because a company went out of business doesn't mean there aren't things you could take from it to use successfully.
ReplyDeleteLet's face it, the NWA died because their business infrastructure was terrible, not because their product was terrible. They were also trying to compete with the WWF at its peak and they didn't have the business sense to be able to do that.
I believe TNA would be better off taking some of the NWA's principles. Get back to fundamental wrestling. Use more squash matches to protect and buildup your current stars. Don't use the same angles and storylines that have been beaten into the ground for the past 15+ years. Go with more basic stories that work: Wrestler A wants to beat the fuck out of Wrestler B and take Wrestler B's title.
I did sit far away, but there were a bunch of sections at the stadium that were nearly empty. Also, having seats on the field probably would have caused more empty bleacher sections, making it look worse.
ReplyDeleteActually, other than the NWO era, WCW was a money loser. It rarely lost a lot, until the end, but it never had a profitable year until 1996 or 97, I forget which.
ReplyDeleteStep 1: DO NOT COMPETE WITH THE WWE. Accept what you have, and work with it. It'll be harder now that it might have been 12-18 months ago, but it's not completely hopeless... yet.
ReplyDeleteStep 2: NO BIG SIGNINGS. Keep the pocketbook close, as long as you're still in survival mode. The "latest ex-WWE savior" bullshit isn't worth the money at this point... once again, use what you have. There's enough talent to make it work for now, barring a mass defection (to... Japan? ROH? It damn sure won't be WWE.)
Step 3: MAKE THE FUTURE NOW. Angle, Bully, Hardy, are your present at best, and should be on the road to becoming your past in the near future. Let them get that one last run, that one last moment... then it's time to be phased aside, if not out.
Sting is your past already, and unless his current angle is putting EC3 over at the end, it's not a good idea. Anderson is... useless. Bully can use him to build back up.
Your present/future should be Roode, Aries, Storm (still viable, even if he needs a small reboot), Magnus, Joe, (who else?).
Anyone not mentioned is either better off in other roles (Daniels with Kazarian are their best uses at the moment... MAYBE as a one-off challenger... Abyss/Park isn't viable at the moment, and he might be best in the Angle/Bully/Hardy role soon... Styles, IF he were to return, might also fall into that role soon... EY could be a wildcard, but highly unlikely...)
I remember reading that a couple of weeks ago. Even if this is a fundraiser, and even if this is the equivalent of a big-city middle school (it's not), that sounds so rinky-dink. Even Vance High School would sound better.
ReplyDeleteIs the Showboat still around? I'd love to see the mix of new and old school, with lasers and those red stacking chairs.
ReplyDeleteIt's the cheapest women you pay the most for.
ReplyDeleteShe's 6 months away from filming herself playing with wrestling action figures and posting it on youtube.
ReplyDeleteVance High School couldn't contain the pure awesomeness that is TNA!!
ReplyDeleteIts hard to muster any emotion toward TNA
ReplyDeleteThis, although I don't think step 3 is that dire. Angle, Bully, and Hardy still have enough go in them and are recognizable faces to casual wrestling fans from the last big boom period in wrestling that I think they're valuable enough assets. Not to be top guys or get a run with the belt, but to work with the guys like Roode and Aries, have good matches, be faces channel flippers recognize, etc.
ReplyDeleteSting should be elevating/putting over EC3 and then be out the door though.
They could split it during the day, do 2 shows in a row take an hour or so break to change the crowd and do the other 2 shows.
ReplyDelete