Hogan WCW Contract
By Scott Keith on 14 February 2025
Hi Scott,
Reading your thoughts today on 94 Hogan got me to thinking: why the heck did WCW ever feel the need to give him that contract in the first place? Was there a bidding war? Would he have just sat at home if he only got a “decent” chunk of PPV revenue and not a “preposterously, cripplingly large” chunk? What else was he gonna do, stay in Japan? Run for the senate? Just seems like they bid against themselves.
The problem from WCW's standpoint is that they were losing millions of dollars in 1993 and there was a very real, non-zero, chance that TBS was just going to shut the company down and sell it off if they couldn't turn it around in a hurry. So it was either bring in Hogan and start generating revenue, or find another job. And from the standpoint of the people who owned the company, why would they care if WCW got shafted on the PPV revenue? TBS got their cut, Hulk Hogan got his cut, everyone who matters to the executives is happy. Plus the goal with Hogan was to offset his ridiculous contract with movie deals for Turner, which offloaded a bunch of money to their other divisions anyway. So it does kind of make sense in a corporate backdoor shenanigans type of way.