Eric Bischoff Reveals Details on Hulk Hogan’s Original WCW Contract

– During his latest 83 Weeks podcast, Eric Bischoff revealed details of Hulk Hogan’s WCW contract and how the company justified giving Hogan the deal that they did. Bischoff addressed reports from the time of Hogan’s signing that the New England Sports Network ran a story that Hogan would get $600,000 or 40% of company gross for every PPV.

“As far as to how much Hogan got, that was a close report by New England Sports Network,” Bischoff said. “His deal called for four pay-per-views a year at half a million dollars a pay-per-view. And in addition to compensation for the pay-per-view, those pay-per-views included — I think it was three or four weeks of television leading into the pay-per-view. And I think there was a Clash of Champions or two in that schedule as well, all under what is essentially a $2 million contract. That was basically the deal.”

Bischoff added, “Now there was some other licensing and merchandising caveats — which by the way, didn’t really matter because we weren’t generating any revenue anyway in licensing and merchandising. Not enough to matter, at least. But if you boiled the meat off the bone and get right down the basic facts of Hogan’s deal, the original deal called for four pay-per-views a year at half a million dollars a pay-per-view.”

Bischoff noted though that this wasn’t strictly about the PPV and television numbers.

“The approach that we took [was that] having Hogan on board, even if we didn’t cover his costs on pay-per-view, we believed — and as it turned out to be very true in ’96, ’97, ’98 — that having Hogan on board would raise the tide in all of the other areas of our business. Not just pay-per-view. So we didn’t go into this thinking, ‘Well, in order for this to make sense and for Hogan’s deal to make financial sense, we’re going to have to do this on each one of these pay-per-views. It wasn’t the approach at all. The approach was, having Hulk Hogan would get us more press, more publicity that we can’t afford to pay for. It will increase our viability internationally. Both for international television distribution, which was a very big target for us, we knew that was a way that we could really increase our bottom-line revenue without any incremental costs associated with it other than having Hogan a part of it. So we would spread Hogan’s $2 million throughout the various revenue streams that WCW had in hopes of monetizing it and improving our bottom line. And as it turned out, it worked.”

If you use any of the quotes in this article, please credit 83 Weeks with a h/t to 411mania.com for the transcription.