Through The Ropes

The news that WWE Films had signed “Stone Cold” Steve Austin to a three-movie deal didn’t excite me. However, the fact that the first movie will be titled “The Condemned” is prophetic. For World Wrestling En-tertainment to spend this much time making movies when it should be concentrating on its wrestling content is like taking a lethal injection.

This won’t work. Vince McMahon tried a bodybuilding federation, tried pro football, and failed miserably. Vince is going to be executive producer on the movie, taking time away from him approving the creative content for shows. These flicks might as well be straight-to-video, as chances are they will spend five minutes in the theatres.

And what about Austin? I don’t know about you, but the Austin/Eric Bischoff co-GM storyline was some great stuff. His knees are shot, but Stone Cold’s ability to entertain at shows is legendary even when he hasn’t been able to apply one headlock. Instead of trying to sign him to do movies, get him to make recurring appearances at shows when some justice is needed. To try to push Stone Cold, Triple H, The Rock, etc., etc., into movie roles is eventually robbing the company of too much talent.

Question: Has WWE benefited from The Rock becoming a movie star? No! He’s kind of disappeared, hasn’t he? None of his movies have become blockbusters, and he started to shy away from talking about wrestling when he was interviewed. So he didn’t really help WWE that much from a marketing standpoint.

All this talk about movies reminds me of World Championship Wrestling doing that atrocious “Ready To Rum-ble” rotten tomato with David Arquette. So much manpower, time and crea-tive abilities were wasted while WWE was pulling the entire wrestling in-dustry from under WCW’s feet. This time around, WWE doesn’t have similar competition and can’t be overtaken, but that doesn’t make it the correct decision.

The good word is that McMahon lost a cool $40 million on that XFL garbage. It was so bad because they didn’t have a proper training camp for what were already substandard players. Will WWE similarly cut corners on this movie project and hope that it flies anyway?

Let’s look at what that $40 million could have bought. It could have locked up The Rock to the point where he wouldn’t feel the need to do many movies (hopefully, he’s feeling that way right now anyway, since his flicks stink). It could have been the seed money to keep WCW and ECW going once Mc-Mahon acquired their rights. Yes, Vince could have three promotions running right now instead of one.

The point is that McMahon sees areas in which he has failed (anything other than wrestling) and personally feels the need to branch out for no reason. As successful as he has been anyway, imagine what he would have if he didn’t keep throwing good mo-ney after bad on side projects.

A few movies will get made, and like everything else (oh, yeah, I forgot the WWE New York restaurant disaster), Vince will be writing off this latest failure on his tax returns. Set up a good WrestleMania for us. There’s enough people making bad “B” action movies right now.

You can contact Josh Stewart at throughtheropes1@cs.com.