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NewsWWE Executive Talks Lack Of WWE Studios Success

WWE Executive Talks Lack Of WWE Studios Success

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WWE CFO George Barrios recently spoke about WWE Studios. Here are the highlights…

On WWE Studios: “We think it fits. As I mentioned in my opening, we’ve been successful, creating content and monetizing it on every platform. So we think we have the DNA to create content and monetize on that platform. We also think it brings the brand to people who are fans today. When I was watching The Call at my movie theater and the WWE logo comes up and you can hear people going, WWE, is that the wrestling and the movie comes on, can you put a price tag in that moment? No. Overtime, do we think if we are successful, does that broaden the brand? We think so. So that’s why we are in it and we think we can make money.”

On The Lack of Financial Success: “No, we haven’t been successful doing that part. The first, if you look at our movie business, we spent about $100 million starting in 2006 through 2009, releasing seven movies and we did just better than break-even, so not good enough. We did like 3% IRR. We changed the model, hired someone from the outside to produce and run the business and we were going to self distribute because we thought we could keep a bigger share of the economic. We released nine movies in 2010 and ’11 that we will produce starting at ‘9 until the beginning of ’10 and those movies did not do well at all. They compressed earnings in 2011 because the impairments were close to $30 million. And in our size business, obviously that’s a massive hit. Got a new team in place for the first time, at least since I’ve been there. We brought someone in with commercial experience in the movie industry, specifically Miramax, Michael Luisi. And he’s been running the business of movies being released at this point starting late last year and we’ve released three so far this year, actually four.”

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