I'll take that bet Dave.

September 4, 2018 9:01 AM

The biggest independent wrestling show of all time took place Saturday. Here’s what it means to the wrestlers who created it, the fans who cheered it on, and the industry it's disrupting.

posted by Etrigan (8 comments total)

Went to my first WWE event last week. It was very polished, very corporate. Good to hear that there's competition that at least trying to be fairer to the performers, in the sense that seem freer to wrestle with competing leagues and keep their own proceeds of merch and streaming revenue.
posted by LegallyBread at 11:04 AM on September 4, 2018 [1 favorite]

I grew up here in Florida in the 70's, watching his dad, Dusty Rhodes, and even though I know NOTHING about wrestling these days, I am SUPER happy that a Rhodes is holding a championship belt again.
posted by Major Matt Mason Dixon at 12:10 PM on September 4, 2018 [1 favorite]

Previously
posted by zinon at 12:15 PM on September 4, 2018

I cannot wait to hear mightygodking's take on this.
posted by JHarris at 8:00 PM on September 4, 2018

I know a lot of people are going to go past this because wrestling. But from a financial and business perspective, you really shouldn't. The word "historic" is very overused, but this is one of those times it applies, even if it applies to a medium some of us might not care much about.

WWE's Market Cap as I'm typing this is about $6.9 Billion US. The TV-type folks are looking for something, anything, that has added value being watched live instead of taped. And for a long time, the advertising value, the spending money, and the intelligence of wrestling fans was dismissed as limited at best.

That's no longer true of either the fans or especially the wrestlers. Consider match #5 of the night at All In. 25 years ago, Glen Jacobs, in the heyday of gimmicks that were wrestlers who moonlighted as other things, portrayed a wrestling dentist. Today, Britt Baker lives the gimmick, having recently graduated from dental school. Her entrance video? A x-ray of her keeping a person's teeth out of their mouth.

So, now WWE's most recent TV contracts are absolutely massive (contracts plural -- their properties were valuable enough that they bifurcated them into two different deals with NBCU and FOX, NFL-style). They are getting "More-money than they can spend" kinds of contracts now.

And a shot was just fired across their bow. And a lot of the same players that participate in All In are will next year run a show at Madison Square Garden, a venue that was seen as so iconic to WWE that taking a WWE contract was, in the past, referred to as "going to New York" even though WWE's headquarters are in Connecticut.

So a not-WWE enterprise just sold out a 10,000 seat venue in American. And it will be eclipsed in 6 months when a not-WWE enterprise likely sells out a 20,000 seat venue.
posted by parliboy at 8:04 PM on September 4, 2018 [3 favorites]

A couple of things worth pointing out:

-- this is an example of the workers seizing the means of production. The Bucks and Cody are workers more than promoters.

-- The ongoing storytelling that has been happening for the last year or so is really very interesting. They are telling stories that take place in multiple wrestling promotions literally located all around the world. And additional storytelling has been happening on Youtube only shows, primarily Being The Elite. In order to follow all the story, fans have to pay attention to a variety of independent promotions as well as internet content. And at All In, they managed to provide closure for a variety of stories built up on BTE.
posted by Burgoo at 12:46 PM on September 5, 2018 [3 favorites]

They are telling stories that take place in multiple wrestling promotions literally located all around the world.

My god, I just had a glimpse of the alternate universe where WWE said "Nah, the Broken Hardys stuff is too weird, and they're both about to fall apart physically anyway" last year, and they'd been able to continue their hunt for all the tag team belts in all the promotions.

chills
posted by Etrigan at 2:17 PM on September 5, 2018 [1 favorite]

I was at All In, but it almost didn't happen. I tried to get tickets the moment they went on sale and failed, with the page timing out and then bam - 2 minutes later - the tickets were gone. Luckily I had texted a coworker a few minutes before they went on sale, asking if he was going to try too. Somehow, although he was a passenger in a car on a road trip in the middle of Michigan and only on his phone, he was able to get us tickets.

In the last 5 or so years, I've been to several independent wrestling shows, typically in a small neighborhood auditorium, Eagles club, or weird suburban entertainment venue - Shimmer, AAW, Chikara, Progress, etc. I've been to four NXT Takeover events, one WWE live event (a non-televised WWE show), and this April in New Orleans, I attended Wrestlemania.

I have to admit, I wasn't as psyched as I probably should have been before All In. My wrestling interest waxes and wanes, often based on how compelling WWE has been. Which is not fair but it's the lowest effort wrestling to watch so it drives a lot of how I feel about the genre, and lately it's been pretty low. It's like if you really love music but only have been listening to commercial radio, you might start to get a little bored of it. Anyway, I was just hoping that the show wouldn't be just your same old Ring of Honor show. I had been to one joint ROH/NJPW showcase type event, and it was fun enough but also pretty inside baseball - it felt like it was more about checking boxes of seeing certain performers do certain moves or certain matchups and less about telling a compelling story in the ring. Plus as much as I may appreciate each of the individuals primarily involved in All In, I actually kind of hate the Bullet Club as a cultural phenomenon.

Thankfully, the matches at All In weren't just dream match bucket list spot fests. They did a good job of using video packages and backstage promos to set the stage for the stories that had been building in the months leading up to the event, so that even if you didn't watch Being the Elite you had enough background to know why these folks were fighting and what they were fighting over. This was critical to the success of the event, because while I may have a New Japan subscription, I don't watch ROH, and someone who watches ROH might not have a NJPW subscription, and/or there may be someone only watching the youtube stuff and getting the rest from twitter gif accounts or recaps.

All In was a really fascinating experience, because it did straddle that line between your typical indie show with maybe 150-500 fans and the huge, super produced WWE experience. The videos and backstage promos were good, and the pacing of the event was well-planned. (Save for the fact that several matches ran long, leaving the six-man main event to be pretty rushed so they could end at 10 as required for the PPV.) But there was a lot of dead time in between matches. And the pyrotechnics were... kind of anemic for the size of the space.

But it was FUN. I've never seen a crowd stay that hot for an entire 5 hours of wrestling. My ears were ringing afterwards like I had been at a concert. The matches were all good, and you never really saw the crowd check out or a single moment or match when people streamed out for a bathroom or beer break. Everything kept the fans' attention, and everyone was so damn happy to be there that the energy just radiated back and forth between the crowd and the performers. I got goosebumps several times seeing some of the wrestlers pause, look around, and soak it in. Even that rushed main event seemed like a fitting way to end the whole endeavor, with a hyper-manic light speed match that built to a crazy crescendo.

The article talks about how important YouTube is to the success of All In, and I agree it's really a big part of how indie wrestlers develop rivalries and stories that cross promotions. But we also can't forget how easy it is to watch the actual wrestling now. The first PPV I ever saw was a WWE Royal Rumble that I watched via an illegal stream I found on the interwebs. Within months, the WWE Network launched and my household has been a subscriber ever since. I subscribe to New Japan for like $9 a month, and there's an app for Apple TV and Amazon fire stick. ROH has a subscription service. WWE Network was a bellwether, and now many indie promotions are streaming events live or producing and offering recordings online much sooner than the days of buying DVDs months after the event happened.

Anyway, the event was hella fun and I'm really happy for the wrestlers who pulled it together.
posted by misskaz at 5:51 PM on September 5, 2018 [5 favorites]