World Wrestling Entertainment is currently the biggest professional wrestling entity in the world. Founded in 1953, the WWE have practically monopolized North American pro wrestling for decades and many of their wrestlers like Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and Dave Bautista becoming big Hollywood stars.
However, last year the company took a big blow when its then CEO/Chariman, Vince McMahoh, was forced to step down following a legal investigation over money paid to former female employees for sexual favors. His son in law Paul Levesque aka Triple H took over as creative head of the company while his daughter Stephenie McMahon took over executive roles.
Now in a surprise twist Vince McMahon has returned to the board of executives ahead of a potential sale of the company. The current contracts with Fox Sports and USANetwork are said to expire later this year.
He stated:
“My return will allow WWE, as well as any transaction counterparties, to engage in these processes knowing they will have the support of the controlling shareholder.“
The company currently has an estimated market cap of $6 Billion, which may lead to multiple big corporations to bid on the popular sports brand.
According to CNBC a list of potential buyers has been compiled with names like Fox Sports, Warner Bros. Discovery and even Comcast (Who currently has a streaming partnership with WWE via Peacock) being dropped. But one name on there that some people may not have expected to see was Disney.
Believe it or not Disney has a history with pro wrestling, the biggest example being the period when episodes of Ted Turner’s WCW Monday Nitro and WCW Worldwide were filmed at Disney-MGM Studios back in the 1990s.
CNBC’s argument for Disney buying WWE would be to bolster their content for the ESPN+ streaming service. At one point ESPN+ was considered to be the network that WWE would partner with, but chose Peacock instead. However, rumors suggest that decision has somewhat become one WWE has since regretted.
For some time it has been rumored that Disney was interested in the company, in 2021 a well known former WWE employee stated that there had talks to sell to Disney. And just last year Disney and WWE partnered to stream WWE content on Disney+ in Indonesia and other smaller Asian countries.
If Disney does indeed get its hands on WWE, you can expect some of their more violent and risqué content being either censored or removed from their library, especially content from the WWF attitude era or their library of ECW content.
What do you think? Is Disney ready to spend $6 Billion to help bring I more viewers to ESPN+?
Source: CNBC
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