The Curse of the Monday Night War?

Eric Bischoff’s decision to run a live edition of Nitro against the pre-taped Monday Night War in 1995 helped usher in the Monday Night War that ushered in the biggest boom in professional wrestling history, which lasted from 1996-2001.

While we talk about how great the Monday Night War was, isn’t there the negative aspect that the War brought to wrestling? The competition between the two shows eventually led to a three hour Nitro with no squash matches and a two-hour Thunder on Thursday nights as well as WWF with their multiple shows. So we now have a three hour Raw, a two hour Smackdown, and not to forget 205 Live and NXT on the WWE Network. Pay Per Views kind of stopped being must see TV when you’d get live TV the next night.

So did the Monday Night War hurt wrestling more than it helped because we have a glut of television with no squash matches and PPV caliber matches that pretty much killed off the PPV business? The boom was 5 years long, but it’s been 15 years since WCW died.

​Hot take, bro. But yeah, it absolutely hurt a LOT about the business. The main thing is that fans got accustomed to hotshot booking and stunt-show matches on a regular basis, and they had to completely re-educate people for about 3 years until crowds could follow and understand a technical match again. In terms of WWE business, however, they made a LOT of money, invested it into taking the company public and creating the current self-regulating version of the product, and lived happily ever after. So there’s that aspect at least.​