Posted in: Movies, Sports, TV | Tagged: impact, tna, wrasslin, wrestling
On The Bright Side, Impact Wrestling Isn't So Bad They Can't Pay People To Watch It
The beleaguered pro wrestling league formerly known as TNA has been having a bad couple of months. Okay, a bad couple of years. Okay, a bad decade or so. In just the last year narrowly survived a takeover attempt by Smashing Pumpkins vocalist Billy Corgan, only to be bought out by Anthem Sports & Entertainment, lose a bunch of their top stars, gained a new star in Alberto El Patron who immediately became involved in a public altercation with his fiancee, Paige, and had to be suspended right after winning the world championship, brought back co-founder Jeff Jarrett and rebranded under his company name, GFW, only to force Jarrett back out and rebrand back as Impact Wrestling again, all the while feuding publicly with Reby Hardy over Matt Hardy's "Broken" gimmick. You know, business as usual for TNA… we mean Impact.
The latest embarrassing report for the company revealed that Impact is paying extras to fill the crowd at their TV tapings in Ottawa. Impact hired a casting company to hire their crowd, and in typical Impact fashion, the casting company posted the casting call on Facebook, where it was immediately located by dirt sheets and posted all over the internet. The job paid $12.50 an hour for twelve hours of watching wrestling over the course of three days, and was seeking 50-75 people, which amounts to about $10,000 to fill the crowd at the tapings.
But it could be worse. At least people were willing to watch 12 hours of Impact Wrestling for $150. If we're being honest, we're not sure we could do it for that long for less than $800. Additionally, since Impact is already at such a low point, they only need less than 100 people to make their crowd look full. If they were more popular and playing at bigger venues, they would need to spend a lot more money to hire even more extras to watch their wrestling.
All we're saying is, to every dark cloud, there's a silver lining. Or in Impact Wrestling's case, a lining made of all those gold karatbars Jarrett stuck them with, and if we're looking on the bright side, who even knew they'd be worth that much?!
It looks like everything is coming up Impact.