It’s time for the wrestling world to tell new stories beyond ‘Who Killed WCW’

Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s WWE return in January sent shockwaves throughout the wrestling community.

The return culminated in Johnson wrestling his first match in 11 years at WrestleMania XL, teaming with his cousin Roman Reigns to defeat Cody Rhodes and Seth Rollins in a tag team match to close out the event’s first night.

At the same time, Johnson and his production company, Seven Bucks Production, were involved in producing Vice’s Who Killed WCW? miniseries. The miniseries, which wrapped up its four-episode run earlier this week, looks at the demise of World Championship Wrestling. This Ted Turner-backed wrestling promotion was more popular than WWE (then named the World Wrestling Federation, or WWF) for two years in the late 90s, leading to the famed Monday Night Wars and the WWF’s Attitude Era, a period fondly remembered for the company becoming more edgy and mature which saw Johnson become one of the company’s top stars.

After WCW ceased operations in early 2001, WWE became the only “major” wrestling promotion in the United States. While others like Total Nonstop Action and Ring of Honor existed, they didn’t have nearly the resources or reach as WWE. It wasn’t until All Elite Wrestling’s formation in 2019 that WWE had a semblance of competition again.

One of the problems with WWE running virtually unopposed for nearly 20 years was that they were thrilled to tell you all about taking down the evil billionaire Ted Turner and WCW. Vince McMahon bought WCW in March 2001 for around $4 million, getting all contracts, logos, and the company’s tape library. WWE could air all of the WCW footage that they wanted since they owned it all, and in the time since, there have been multiple DVDs and a miniseries of their own in 2014 when the WWE Network first launched about both the Monday Night Wars and WCW’s rise and fall.

While Who Killed WCW? did a decent job telling that story, featuring interviews from big-name WCW wrestlers and Turner executives from the time, it’s a story that wrestling fans have heard front-to-back numerous times by now. There’s WWE produced documentaries like The Rise and Fall of WCW and Monday Night War. There are countless podcasts by former WCW employees that relive those years like Eric Bischoff’s 83 Weeks and Tony Schiavone’s What Happened When. By now we know everything there possibly could be to know about “The Fingerpoke of Doom.”

What if, instead of yet another WCW series, the next wrestling story told on a grand stage was one of these?

The Launch of NXT

When WWE’s developmental brand, NXT, launched in 2010, it marked the first time fans could see the company’s future stars on national TV every week. WWE had developmental brands for years before that, such as Ohio Valley Wrestling or Deep South Wrestling, but NXT was available nationally as opposed to those brands that aired regionally. Originally, WWE planned for NXT to be a contest where selected developmental wrestlers would have a WWE wrestler assigned as their mentor to help them develop both inside and outside the ring. Over time, WWE changed the format, and as the company signed more wrestlers, it became a full-fledged third brand.

In 2012, legendary wrestler Dusty Rhodes (Cody’s father) took over the brand’s creative and helped guide Bayley, Kevin Owens, Sami Zayn, Finn Balor, and countless other wrestlers we see on WWE TV today along the way. After Rhodes died in 2015, Levesque took over the brand, molding it into a Ring of Honor-style promotion featuring longer matches and riskier moves than you’d see on the main WWE shows of the time. The brand reached great heights before the launch of AEW, and subsequent head-to-head “Wednesday Night Wars” would lead to another reboot. 2021’s shift to NXT 2.0 was more character-based than in-ring-based. They dropped that concept in 2022 and are now just NXT again, implementing elements of all previous eras as they move to The CW in October.

The Highs and Lows of AEW

WWE’s strongest challenger brand since WCW went out of business has only existed for five years, but they’ve covered plenty of ground in that time. From the Wednesday Night Wars between AEW and NXT to the company’s trials and tribulations during the pandemic to signing and debuting longtime ex-WWE main-eventers CM Punk and Bryan Danielson in the same three-week stretch in the summer of 2021, there are plenty of stories to tell from those early days. And things have only gotten more fascinating since then. With the drama of “Brawl Out” and “Brawl In” and the departure of Punk, there are fresh stories that fans are dying to know more about still guarded in clouds of mystery.

It would be a no-brainer for AEW to put out a five-year retrospective of the company or for an outside group to take a more pointed look at some of the new promotion’s early controversies.

The Truth about World Class Championship Wrestling

When A24’s The Iron Claw was released in late 2023, people who had previously not known the story of the Von Erich family and Texas’ World Class Championship Wrestling were shocked to learn about the tragedies that seemed to follow the family around. The Iron Claw scratched the surface of the tragic story of the Von Erichs.

However, it’s impossible to tell the whole story of the family and promotion in a two-hour film. The Iron Claw, for example, had to cut out one of the Von Erich brothers entirely due to time constraints. A documentary-based or biographical miniseries would have a much larger canvas to work with. Even though a couple documentaries have been made, the appetite for a new in-depth look has never been higher.