Vince McMahon wants MORE!

The Boneyard Match. The Firefly Fun House Match. #OneLastBeat. And in a few weeks, the combined Money in the Bank matches that will take place in Titan Towers. These are the “cinematic” matches WWE has produced in these stressful days of the COVID pandemic, the resulting stay-at-home measures, and the subsequent “Empty Arena Era” we find ourselves in. But these may not be the only ones the WWE produces. As reported on THE ProWrestlingSheet by Ryan Satin, and based on a WWE Q1 investors conference call, Vince McMahon is apparently planning for the WWE to continue its cinematic adventures.

The investor call Thursday, 4/23/2020, was about those first quarter earnings (which are apparently up, by the way), but it began with Mr. McMahon addressing the company’s standing during the pandemic. He touched upon WWE’s continued running of shows from the Performance Center, and confirmed there are plans to produce even more of the special cinematic matches. ProWrestlingSheet provides the full transcript of what Mr. McMahon said during this call.

“It’s interesting to look at what happened once we went to, in essence, our studio which is our Performance Center. There really wasn’t, especially on SmackDown, there really wasn’t that much difference in terms of where we were and in terms of where we are now. It’s a challenging environment, obviously. But nonetheless, you’ve got to take advantage of that challenging environment and somehow make it, obviously, as good as it can. But make it special. So we’ve done certain things we’re gonna do more of. For instance, getting out of that environment and doing, in essence, mini-movies. Like we did at WrestleMania. And many other personality profiles that we can do a whole lot better and will.” 

While we have yet to see how this year’s Money in the Bank will go with its special “corporate ladder” match, many feel The Boneyard and Firefly Fun House hit it out of the park, and that even #OneLastBeat did great for NXT. Surely that level of attention to detail will be put into the MITB’s most unique match yet.

However, there is also concern that Vince McMahon will overdo these, as he often does with many things in the WWE. The post-Mania episode of WWE Backstage spoke to the fact that in order to make these cinematic matches feel special, they need to be rare. These matches need to be used sparingly and for the right stories. But as the transcription shows, Vince McMahon is speaking specifically to how they’ve taken advantage of this “challenging environment.” Once the threat of COVID has died down and the stay-at-home orders are lifted, it is likely Vince settles back into his old ways of just disappointing us with live weekly storytelling. Only time will tell, but feel free to tell us which side of this you are on. Is it great that another major storyline (or two) will have a powerful pre-taped payoff? Or are you skeptical of Vince’s handling of this future endeavor?