WWE Royal Rumble 1989

Back in the late 1980s, WWE was engaging in an aggressive war on Jim Crockett Promotions, having already put a number of the regional territories out of business in the preceding years. JCP was the one promotion still standing and had done quite a lot of expansion itself in an attempt to keep up with WWE. In November 1987, as part of that expansion, JCP ran Starrcade, their main show of the year, as a pay-per-view, hoping that the revenue generated by the event would help them survive the continued onslaught from McMahon’s company. In a bid to undercut JCP, McMahon dreamed up Survivor Series, scheduled it on the same day as Starrcade and told pay-per-view providers that they could only run one of the two events. As a proven pay-per-view buy getter, the majority of the providers dropped Starrcade and aired Survivor Series instead. Crockett attempted to once again take advantage of the growing pay-per-view market just a couple of months later, presenting The Bunkhouse Stampede event, again WWE decided to eat into the show’s potential buy rate by airing a free television special on the USA Network entitled The Royal Rumble on the same night. With wrestling fans being forced to chose between a free wrestling event on a widely available cable channel and a pay event, Bunkhouse Stampede was another commercial failure for Jim Crockett Promotions.

WCW Starrcade 1995

As a recently leaked copy of WCW’s contract with Hulk Hogan revealed, WCW went out of their way to secure the services of what was at the time, the biggest name in all of pro wrestling. Amongst the list of perks that Hogan had secured as part of his deal were things like a $2,000,000 signing bonus, $20,000 per month just for wearing NWO t-shirts (a portion of the profits from sales of which he also earned) and approval over the outcome of all wrestling matches in which he appeared. These bonuses that Hogan had managed to wrangle himself were unprecedented in the industry, and would eventually go some way to changing the business end of wrestling- specifically the manner in which wrestlers were paid. They were however, simply the tip of the iceberg in terms of Hogan’s overall remuneration package as Hogan had also negotiated himself 15% of pay-per-view sales or $675,000 for pay events on which he appeared (whichever was the largest) and 25% of the gross of ticket sales for any other event, whether a Monday Nitro, Thunder or house show. Not only are these figures absolutely stunning but at the time, meant that WCW had to be very selective about where, when and how often they used ‘The Hulkster’.