On a recent edition of his “Strictly Business” podcast, Eric Bischoff weighed in on Impact Wrestling’s rebranding back to TNA Wrestling at Hard To Kill in January 2024.
You can check out some highlights from the podcast below:
On Impact Wrestling bringing back TNA: “I understand. I can understand why they did it, I certainly haven’t talked to you about it. You know, there is an argument to be made — I’m not sure I buy into it 100% in this particular case, but there is an argument to be made that tapping into nostalgia is a good thing. But let’s be honest here. Not wanting to offend anybody or hurt anybody’s feelings, but TNA was always a pimple on a pig’s ass. It had a very small — loyal, but small, relatively speaking — market share in terms of television. It was never a big property. It was an emerging property, and it was exciting for a while because it was new and there was a new car smell, and all the same things that we see with Dynamite or AEW I should say. But I just don’t think that brand had enough value ever so that bringing it back is going to have any kind of, no pun intended, impact.
“I think it’s interesting, and it gets people excited. There will be some chatter on social media. Which is a buzz. It’s another way of saying buzz, there’ll be some buzz. But unless the product changes and there’s a significant change in the presentation to coincide with the rebranding, it’s just changing the name of the show. And I don’t think that that’s really going to matter one bit. Again, there wasn’t enough value in the TNA brand to begin with. And it’s still TNA, and you can say ‘Oh yeah, but it means Total Nonstop Action.’ It meant t**s and ass. It was a Vince Russo idea. And as time went on, it was, ‘Well kind of tone down, we can’t have girls dancing in cages and stupid s**t. We got to tone it down.’ And it was like, ‘Oh, it’s not — it’s Total Nonstop Action.’ Well, okay, I guess, but like I said, there was just never enough value to begin with to expect that bringing it back is going to have any kind of significant impact on the property.”
On Impact’s ratings: “How many people are watching it? 300, 200,000 people on an episode consistently? That’s — you know, I could do a YouTube show of me cooking a f**king steak and do that many views. It’s just not — nobody’s watching it. It’d be a fantastic property. That’s what I mean about presentation. You know, presentation also includes where do you see it? Otherwise, it’s a tree that falls in the forest and nobody hears it or sees it. And that’s what Impact is. Regardless of the talent, the roster, how good the show is put together creatively, it’s got to look and feel significant in order to expect to see any kind of uptick in audience reaction.”
