Vince McMahon Needs To George Lucas His Way Out Of WWE
Vince McMahon has long been considered Master of the Wrestling Domain. Taking his father’s regional promotion national and turning it into the sometimes-billion-dollar juggernaut that it is deserves some respect, no doubt.
Along the way, he even became an in-ring performer himself, and a darn good one. However, every great talent reaches its expiration date, and it appears as though Vince McMahon has reached his, both in front of and behind the camera.
We could cite the rollout of the WWE Network as an example, as well as the unstable WWE stock prices and the loss of revenue the company has seen due to missed PPV sales. However, these are ultimately things that can be worked out, and the WWE is, in fact, taking hard but necessary steps to ensure those things are addressed.
However, the one step that it needs to take to be a viable product again is the one that George Lucas took with his own creation about a year ago. When Lucas sold out to Disney, he reinvigorated the Star Wars franchise he’d built up almost 40 years ago. Lucas knew it was time, and so he set a fair price and gave that creation to the fans by allowing a younger and more energetic creative force to control the sandbox. (Younger by the creative talents involved, not the company.)
Vince McMahon is at that point, and it goes back to creative. It’s well-known that McMahon runs every aspect of the creative side. He’s said to make creative changes even on a segment-by-segment basis, and now it seems he’s using that creative control to bury young talent, as could be seen when he ordered the reappearance of Super-Cena against the Wyatt Family after having Cena decimated by Brock Lesnar at SummerSlam.
Reportedly, Cena being booked so strong against the Wyatt Family was all Vince McMahon, and it was due to the company “not producing main event stars fast enough,” according to WrestleChat.
As much as Vince (and probably John Cena) don’t want to admit it, fans no longer come to see Cena working against the odds. They’re ready for Cena to take a step back from the Main Event picture and instead build the other talent. Bray Wyatt and his brothers are three of the biggest stars in the WWE right now. The fans cheer them even though they’re supposed to be heels. They boo Cena even though he’s the company’s top babyface. On this last week’s RAW, the Cena boos were deafening.
Vince McMahon and his unwillingness to let go of his old creative ideals to make way for a crop of young talent that fans are dying to get behind, is what is ultimately causing the company’s creative failure at this time.
(And don’t even get us started on this horribly booked Night of Champions, which is essentially a repeat of the SummerSlam card.)
Triple H and Stephanie McMahon are ready. Their championing of the NXT brand and state-of-the-art training facility has upped the in-ring abilities of their performers to a talent the WWE has never known. The promos need to improve somewhat, but they’re on to something, clearly, and it shows in every NXT episode. Whenever you watch a NXT show, you see a fire often lacking on RAW and 100 percent MIA on Smackdown.
The only problem is Vince McMahon. He’s not only holding back the phenomenal talents under contract; he’s choking out the creative freedom of the two people the WWE ultimately needs to survive.
