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As previously noted on PWInsider.com, The Rock's Seven Bucks Production company has been working on a docuseries about the "demise of World Championship Wrestling" in conjunction with Vice.
The series was officially announced today as premiering on 6/4 with Johnson commenting:
“The iconic rise and fall of WCW is one of professional wrestling’s most captivating stories – full of big dreams, massive successes, painful failures, and the harsh realities of the pro wrestling business. With wrestling viewership and fan engagement at an ultimate high, there has never been a more perfect time to tell top-quality wrestling stories, and there’s no better one to start with than a one-of-a-kind, behind-the-scenes look at this epic saga, known as The Rise and Fall of WCW and personally, the rise of WCW, not the fall, inspired me greatly early in my career where I would eventually become, the Final Boss."
Seven Bucks and Vice partnered for the roundtable discussion series Tales of the Territories, which looked at Dallas, Memphis, the Carolinas, Hawaii, Portland and other wrestling hotbeds from the past over ten one-hour episodes that aired on Vice TV in 2022.
World Championship Wrestling, owned by Turner Broadcasting after it acquired Jim Crockett Promotions in 1988, shuttered in March 2001 and was sold to WWE, then known as the World Wrestling Federation. While the promotion sputtered for a good period of time, it was soundly the number two company for most of its existence. In the fall of 1995, Ted Turner ordered WCW Monday Nitro into existence on TNT to give the company its own primetime series, at which point, for the first time, WCW and WWF were on equal footing in terms of cable television programming.
WCW, under Eric Bischoff, took the fight to the WWF and famously beat Raw head to head for 83 weeks, evolving and changing how pro wrestling TV was produced - and with a blueprint that can still be seen in modern day pro wrestling production. For a period of time from 1995 through 1998, WCW ran neck and neck with WWF before overtaking the promotion. The advent of the Steve Austin vs. Vince McMahon feud and the overall presentation of the Attitude Era allowed WWF to turn the tide of battle and for the last several years of its existence, WCW went through different overseers and creative teams but were unable to recapture the mystique of the NWO vs. WCW feud that empowered the promotion in the mid-1990s.
There have been several WWE-produced documentaries looking at WCW and the Monday Night War of that time period as well as several books, including Guy Evans' Nitro, that have looked at the rise and fall of WCW. One would think Evans' book would be the blueprint for the series.
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