Quote:
Originally Posted by Fignuts
The Boom periods were always because of cultural movements that wrestling could easily take advantage of.
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Could make a very strong case that there should have been a boom in the mid-2000s and the reason it didn't happen was due to Vince and WWE's stubbornness over adapting to what was causing it.
When Spike TV bought the tv rights to RAW, they used WWE's high profile at the time to help boost the profile of their smaller UFC property under the correct assumption that wrestling fans could become MMA fans as well.
Once that plan started to bear fruit and UFC took off in mainstream popularity, Vince and WWE failed to both recognize and latch onto it since they saw MMA as nothing more than a fad. The failure of doing that ended up leading to a big shift of wrestling fans moving away from wrestling and into MMA with the repercussions of it lasting to this day.
Within wrestling, ROH guessed right that the future of wrestling would shift more towards work rate for popularity but because they never could seriously challenge WWE, only way a new boom would actually happen is if WWE also recognized it. WWE failed to do so because of Vince's stubbornness over adapting to the changing wind in wrestling post-Attitude Era.