Eric Bischoff Outlines Plans For WCW Brand Split
Separate WCW and nWo shows were officially in the works
For years, Eric Bischoff has defended the nWo’s ever expansive membership during its WCW heyday, stating that it was always intended to split off into its own separate brand.
Now, in a conversation with Fightful, Bischoff has given more details into the fabled WCW/nWo split, saying:
"No, it was going to be a formal brand split. There would have been a moment, an event, something would have happened and WCW would have been designated as - because at that point it would have been clear that the NWO and WCW guys could not play well together under any circumstances. So, to resolve that issue, WCW was gonna get their show, NWO was going to get their show, and then we would have occasional crossovers. They would have looked and felt differently. WCW would have been a more traditional wrestling show because the WCW audience, the core audience, was a more traditional wrestling audience. They were NWA. They were Georgia Championship Wrestling. They were Florida Championship Wrestling, back before cable television. A lot of that heritage was still a part of the WCW audience. So, that show, the WCW show, would have had a more traditional feel to it. NWO would have been a more edgy kind of black and white and grainy."
Bischoff talked more on how the nWo show may have looked, with a clear visual identity established on WCW television via the nWo’s infamous paid advertisements:
"Sure. It would have been - it’s hard for me to pinpoint the date - but it would have been somewhere in the summer ’97, maybe ’98, when the AOL/Time Warner thing was all going down. Once they started moving budgets around and once they started cutting my budgets, telling me what I could and couldn’t do after I had been given the responsibility of launching an entirely new show, I had to pay for it myself. TBS didn’t want to pay for Thunder. So, in addition to having to pay for that show, they were also cutting my budget simultaneously. At that point I knew that we weren’t going to be able to do any of the things we were originally planned to do.” said Bischoff.
