It Could Be Said #9 Bray Wyatt Was A Derivative Magpie and The Financialization of WWE
A look at the Bray Wyatt's limitations, his prospects in AEW, and what his firing says about WWE
On Saturday, the WWE released Windham Rotunda, who had been featured prominently on their programming as Bray Wyatt for nearly eight years. It was the latest in a series of shocking talent departures with Braun Strowman, Alistair Black and Andrade having been released earlier in the year, and both CM Punk and Bryan Danielson are on the brink of debuting in AEW.
Whilst it’s more than possible that WWE are engaging in some brutal talent management, releasing an highly paid talent to then rehire them at a lower price a la WCW in 1999, the fact that they would at the very least risk losing a staple of their main event scene is genuinely staggering. And it raises genuinely concerning questions about their direction as a company.
But first, let’s be clear. Whilst it’s always sad when someone loses their job, Bray Wyatt has not been a positive presence in WWE for a long time.
Wrestlers Are Not Creative
It seems silly to state this but creativity is such an important attribute because it’s so rare. Manifold people excel in creative fields without having a superior imagination because they know the genre, understand structure or are able to turn work in on time. Likewise performers are even less likely to be creative, as opposed to be driven by an innate desire to make audiences like them, and an understanding of the tricks needed to succeed in doing so.
I feel it’s important to state this because there seems to be a widespread misconception that wrestlers are creative people, a belief that withstands such hilarious debunking as Alistair Black listing the various gimmick ideas that WWE had rejected, one of which was blatantly ripped off from the central hook of The Babadook1.
It goes without saying that, Bray Wyatt was the posterchild for the idea of a pro-wrestler as a creative genius. But that’s clearly absurd. It’s not breaking boundaries to debut as a cult leader less than a year after Martha Marcy May Marlene was the breakout indie film of the summer. Outside the bigotry of low expectations that infects all critical analysis of WWE, “Jekyll and Hyde but Jekyll is a kids’ television show host” is nothing more than random splicing of genres akin to shlock such as Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. And whilst working The Exorcist spider-walk into his matches or getting Tom Savini to design a mask for his impersonation of Jason Voorhees may have been cool, they could not be further away from being original ideas.
Indeed, I would argue that last year’s Wrestlemania match against John Cena is the truest distillation of Wyatt’s approach to wrestling. It was a genuinely weird and somewhat enjoyable piece of television but it had no underlying meaning or worth. It was pro-wrestling done by Family Guy, with “Hey Lois, do you remember that time when John Cena was our generation’s Hulk Hogan” the set up for a random collection of pro-wrestling references spanning two decades. Like a magic eye painting you could spend forever trying to piece together the various references into something coherent but you’d only be fooling yourself.
Generation Game
At 34, Bray Wyatt is only a year younger than me. I say this because I think I’ve noticed a trend with people who call him a creative genius – it tends to be people who are either slightly younger than him (i.e. not yet reached their late 20s) or are significantly older than him. People like me who grew up reading the same comics and watching the same movies as him, see him as the derivative magpie that he is.
Notwithstanding the debt he pays to Elizabeth Olsen, there’s a well-known rule that culture tends to be nostalgic for what occurred roughly twenty years before, and just as Scotty Levy raided 1970s Kevin Sullivan to create Raven, Bray Wyatt must surely have been inspired by that most 90s of cult gimmicks2.
Likewise, the spider-walk is actually a late 90s/early 00s trope, given it was originally edited out of the Exorcist for being overly self-indulgent before being reinserted when the film returned to cinemas, and the best bits of The Firefly Funhouse were typically those that mocked the goofy 80s WWF that we were all encouraged to see as inferior to The Attitude Era product we watched in our formative years. And whilst it’s funny to make jokes Alexia Bliss of stealing Wyatt’s heat3, common sense says that she is just plagiarising a portrayal of Harley Quinn that even Warner Bros now recognises was demeaning to women.
This by the way is not necessarily a point against him. Family Guy is after all a long-running television show, and Rogue One and Jurassic World both made over a billion dollars at the box office. Indeed, you could make a good argument that Wyatt was the headliner who best spoke to the WWE-ultras, as opposed to hardcore wrestling fans. After all, if WWE is nothing but episodic television that deliberately evokes comic books with its WWE Universe branding, then it stands to reason that it’s most dedicated fans would be irrationally dedicated to lore.
Indeed, I think lore is another sign that Wyatt is the ultimate child of the 90s. I remember pouring over books about Mortal Kombat or Street Fighter character histories, or watching Pokemon cartoons back then. And I wasn’t even that big a fan of the games at the time, but the plots and characters spoke to me4. As hardcore wrestling fans it’s easy to forget that the product can speak to people in different ways, ways that we don’t like or understand5.
But even if there’s money to be made in being a derivative magpie, there was still a ceiling to Wyatt’s succeess.
Standing On The Shoulders Of Giants
I’m not sure anyone would dispute that the greatest critical and commercial success Bray Wyatt enjoyed was was the Wyatt Family’s feud with The Shield. For all the handwringing about Wyatt losing to Cena at Wrestlemania 30, not reserving the biggest stage possible for what was clearly one of the most anticipated matches in WWE at the time, better explains why Wyatt failed as a headlining. The Wyatt Family was an act that was genuinely greater than the sum of its parts. I would likewise argue that The Shield was too. They thrived in a weird moment in time when Vince McMahon forgot his family’s traditional aversion to pushing tag teams and let them dominate television for months on end, especially Smackdown. But normal service resumed, and he broke up the teams in the belief that would allow him to better monetize the individual members. But just as Roman Reigns was long bereft without his brethren to setup his comeback, Wyatt struggled by himself.
Sadly, whereas Reigns would have the occasional good match to reassure you that there was a singles headliner in there, Wyatt could never escape his limitations. It’s not just that his moveset is banal and his movement is robotic, but unlike someone similarly limited like Cena he lacks the athleticism to work at a fast pace or bump hard. Wrestling in trios match hid all these flaws by limiting his contribution for most of the match to gurning to fans at ringside. It was genuinely effective, but Lou Albano drew crowds to MSG in the same role in the 80s, and nobody was calling for him to defeat Bob Backlund. Furthermore, as PROGRESS is finding with Cara Noir, otherwordly gimmicks are best kept away from the world title picture, and instead used as upper mid-card special attractions like the Undertaker was for the majority of his tenure.
For all the revisionism over this past weekend, this is a guy that had to be carried kicking and streaming to a four-star match with Daniel Bryan back in 2014. Even old man Triple-H got higher than that a few months later. Now like I said to the man that broke the news that Wyatt had been released, pro-wrestling needs to get better at featuring people whose ringwork is more agricultural than what workrate purists enjoy. But Wyatt’s lack of speed or power suggests he wouldn’t have been a Hulk Hogan, Ahmed Johnson or Goldberg that had a smashmouth style who appealed to the less sophisticated fans. Wyatt’s appeal was in the lore and his promos, which is why he was perfectly positioned as being a pseudo-manager for a trio.
Now which promotion has placed a great emphasis on stables?
Anyone Expecting Wyatt?
It was an easy, fun and true joke to say that those who hated the rotten Fiend character, should be careful what we wished for because Windham Rotunda’s release could pave the way for him to appear in a promotion we actually care about. But I think he’s a better fit for AEW than people believe.
Firstly let’s deal with the obvious. Whilst I wouldn’t do it, I think people are being unpleasantly rude in ostentatiously dismissing the idea that Rotunda may replace his sadly deceased friend and storyline protégé Brodie Lee as the leader of the Dark Order. Withstanding the marmite nature of The Fiend character, and the character growth the stable has undergone during their friendship with Hangman Page, an ersatz version of Wyatt would make perfect sense leading the Dark Order.
That everyone inevitably speculates about him helming a new stable underlines how Rotunda always relied on others to carry the load in-ring. But AEW actually suits that very well. They have repeatedly proven an ability to centre managers in storyline, and keep hinting at introducing a trios belt. Whilst I’d personal pair him with a new tag team, that the former Eric Rowan and Braun Strowman are free agents, creates the remarkable possibility that AEW could literally reunite the Wyatt Family on their television should they so choose.
Furthermore, the less crowded PPV schedule allows Rotunda more time to weave the engaging stories his fans believe he’s capable of. And whilst I’m not sure he actually has that ability, AEW certainly is a creative environment that lets pro-wrestlers achieve more than they could in WWE. More cynically, it’s better for everyone that that Rotunda would only need to wrestle in featured matches across (at most) four pay per views a year, rather than the 10+ he’d normally do in WWE. And of course, whereas he would have to utilise weird production gimmicks to mitigate his lack of athleticism in WWE, he can always get the pizza cuters and arse-flares out in AEW.
At the end of the day Bray Wyatt was a highly prominent and popular character within WWE for the last eight years. For all his many faults, there may well be something there that can enhanced the AEW product and grow its fanase. That begs the questions as to why WWE would risk giving its competition such an advantage.
The Financialization of Entertainment
You’d struggled to find someone who looks more different from Rotunda than Scarlett Johansson, but her recent lawsuit against Disney for putting her Black Widow movie on Disney+ speaks to the situation he finds himself in. She accuses Disney of reducing the box office takings because they were primarily concerned with manipulating the share price by increasing the number of people subscribing to their streaming service.
What Johansson is speaking to is the financialization of Disney’s business model. Disney is losing money just like she is by reducing how many people see Black Widow in cinemas or eventually buy it on DVD/Blu-Ray. But she argues that they don’t care because the stock price is more sensitive to how many subscribers Disney+ has. This despite the fact that the service is a money-loser for the company. The reason the stock price is important is because it both sets the ultimate value for the company but also influences remuneration for executives through share options and (potentially) bonuses for keeping shares at a sufficiently high level. It’s not just that they did her and other people who worked on the movie out of money by undermining the box office that’s the problem, it’s that Disney is no longer thinking rationally about profits or revenue, but instead focusing on gimmicks to goose the stock price.
WWE is several years ahead of Disney on this point, due to the fact that it launched the WWE Network way back in 2014. At the time I repeatedly argued that taking the major shows off pay per view was a mistake, because they wouldn’t get the subscribers necessary to cover the shortfall in pay per view revenue. I was right, with the company having to engage in severe cost cutting until they secured improved television deals. But what I got wrong was that the pain was met with significant gain, because whereas the pay per view industry is mysterious to those outside of the combat sports bubble, streaming services are cool and sexy. Whilst anyone who understood the numbers knew WWE had left millions on the table, shareholders and stock analysts swooned as WWE talked about having over a million subscribers. There can be no doubt that in the long-run launching the WWE Network helped improved the company’s image in a way that increased its stock price.
The moves the WWE have made since the pandemic hit only make sense as them once again trying to game the stock price. They’re pulling every lever to increase revenue and decrease spending, be it postponing an office move, merging back office functions, cutting talent, running fewer live events, or gutting their streaming service in return for guaranteed cash. They are not trying to make their current fans happy let alone trying to create new ones, because they are solely focused on getting the profit number up to please shareholders. This might be preparation for putting the company up for sale, but it might as easily be executives whose remuneration is tied up in stock options and stock price-related bonuses focusing on what makes them the most money today.
Either way, it completely changes the cost/benefit calculation when viewing talent. The likes of Wyatt and Strowman may help television ratings, but the revenue from those deals is guaranteed. They may help increase interest in streaming service specials, but in WWE’s biggest market that revenue is now guaranteed due to the move to Peacock6. They may help sell tickets to live events, but live events typically lose money unless they’re taping for television or Peacock, in which case the money is guaranteed. And it’s not entirely clear how important wrestlers are when it comes to merchandise sales, or whether strong sales are just a pavlovian response by fans to the prominence a wrestler has on television and their t-shirts have at the live event stall. If wrestlers don’t generate any money in the short-term, and you’re not focused on expanding the fanbase, then you may as well cut the expensive ones and push their non-union, Mexican equivalents.
But the problem is that like all gambling this approach is inherently risky and short-sighted.
This Is Actually A War
WWE’s viewing figures have become alarmingly low and rather than take measures to improve them, they seem to be actively helping to acclerate the decline. If the viewership keeps shrinking, then at some point it will reach a level where it is simply not viable for television companies to spend hundreds of millions of pounds on their programming. Indeed, both USA Network and FOX are probably already losing money on their deal, given the constant struggle to sell pro-wrestling advertising and the viewer figures being far lower than expected.
And sure, WWE has managed to make more money in the face of declining viewing figures before. Not just them either, UFC pulled off the same trick, even after FOX went with WWE. But UFC was secure in being the only major league MMA promotion on the market, whereas WWE is in a real fight with AEW. The big secret is that the Vince McMahon who was paranoid about All-In and what it may mean for his hegemony was right. Just as not squashing TNA and letting The Ultimate Fighter follow RAW in 2005, hobbled his negotiating leverage with NBC because Spike could pursue cheaper options, the very existence of AEW calls into question his current nine figure television deals. If Turner can get two thirds of the overall viewing figures, and broadly comparable figures in the key demos with AEW, why are USA Network or FOX paying such a premium for WWE? Likewise, when Dynamite starts beating RAW in the viewing figures7, what does that do to the prestige WWE enjoys when trying to work with sponsors or other external partners? It’s worth remembering that WWE’s edge in merchandising evaporated overnight when WCW firmly cemented themsleves as the top promotion in America, because many corporate partners were only interested in working with the biggest wrestling promotion.
In an ideal world WWE would be focused on improving its product and growing its fanbase. In a realistic world it would be using all the old man’s cunning to outfight its rookie competitor. Instead it’s relying on gimmicks to goose the stock price because that makes everyone the most money today. Just as in the early-to-mid-nineties success has defeated Vince McMahon, with his profits dulling his competitive and professional instincts. If he doesn’t wake up soon, this wrestling war may have a different victor than the last one.
To be clear I am also not a creative person, and his plagiarism particularly amused me because it reminded me of when I wrote a drama scene about relationships as a teenager that awkwardly worked in several pages of dialogue from the beginning of The Killing Joke.
There’s a weird thing with later-Gen-X/early-Millennials that due to the long overhang of the boomer era has meant we missed out on our moment of cultural hegemony. We are like David Steel, as generation went from “rising hope to elder statesman without any intervening period whatsoever”. Raven didn’t get the credit he deserved because the average pro-wrestling journalist was the type who agreed with Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler when he slammed Grunge. But Raven also doesn’t get the respect you’d expect from the younger generation because it’s all a bit White Male Privilege. And don’t get me started on my stepson patiently explaining to me what anime is, as if I wasn’t buying manga magazines from my local newsagent more than two decades ago…..
My contribution to the field was particularly good in my opinion
Whilst I did ultimately become a big fighting game fan, I fell away from Pokemon fandom. Which is a problem because it means I have no answer to my son’s repeated questions about who is my favourite Pokemon other than Pikachu. Which is a bit pathetic let’s be honest.
Incidentally, I think a big mistake people make when adapting video games into movies is trying to put the game onto screen rather than the lore. The live-action adaptations that work have next to nothing in common with the games but nail the lead character or scenario.
Worth noting this dynamic is likely to only intensify as Peacock prepares for its international launch, with a British and European version launching shortly. Would explain why NBC staffers have been diligently uploading throwaway NXT UK and PROGRESS these past few months,
Yes, I said when.