Former WWE producer Shane Helms commented on the reports of WWE’s edict regarding third-party platforms during a recent interview with Wrestling Inc.
Here is what he had to say:
“It’s one of those things that kind of sucks, but at the same time, [I’m] not be surprised. I’m trying to look at both sides of the issue. I see the talents going, ‘hey, this will have nothing to do with it. This is our money,’ but then I also look at the promoter side of it, the guy who’s taking all the risks to build these people. It’s money. It’s his platform. A lot of these people, their name value exists on a platform that he created. If I want somebody to be a heel on my show but then on social media, all they’re doing is trying to do all this babyface stuff to attract babyface fans, which is going to be counterproductive to what I’m doing on their show. As a promotor, I can see going, ‘man, don’t these guys get it’ because I even did this when I did my Gregory Helms turn on SmackDown. My social media became heel. I didn’t want the fans then.”
“That’s the one thing that separates us from all these other forms of entertainment and artistry, and I think fans still miss that. I think fans miss that uniqueness, and I’ll see some talents now like, ‘yeah, this is who I am, but this is my character on TV.’ But that’s not what wrestling fans want from us. I mean, that’s one of the things that makes us unique. When a wrestling fan sees me, they still see Hurricane. When I see Tom Hanks, I see Tom Hanks. I never think about a character he is, but when fans see me, they see Hurricane. When I see Steve Austin, I see Stone Cold to this day. He’s been in movies. He’s been on talk shows, but we still see Stone Cold. So I think your social media is counterproductive to who you are on the television product. I can see a promoter not liking that, especially if he’s the one that built you.”
When you sign somebody to an exclusive deal, that whole part of that exclusivity is you only want people to have access for them on your show. So this person goes out and gives access to themselves on all these other platforms, that kind of goes away from what you’re trying to do, and some of those contracts, especially now, when nobody’s really working a lot, there’s not a lot of live events, but some of those downsides are still pretty good. So when you got people making a lot of money to do very little and now they’re going out and diluting their worth by exposing themselves from a different platform, I can see how that would bother WWE. Not saying what they did was the right approach because I really don’t know all the black and white about it at all, but it sounds a little like, ‘you need to do what I tell you to do.’”
