In an appearance on the WrestleSlam podcast, former WCW executive Eric Bischoff discussed which former WCW talent had creative control in their contracts. The general consensus is that all three nWo members, Hulk Hogan, Kevin Nash and Scott Hall, had creative control, but Bischoff claims in fact only one of them did.
“Hall and Nash didn’t have creative control,” Bischoff said. “To clarify, they did have language in their agreement that gave them meaningful consultation. Meaning they were guaranteed to have a conversation with me and it would have been a meaningful conversation, but a meaningful conversation and creative control or two different things, And they did not have creative control.
“Hulk Hogan had creative control and he only used it once. So, the creative control issue was not an issue, even though people like to talk about it and it’s part of the narrative, so I know there’s a lot of narrative and a lot of people have reported that there was creative control and none of those people know what the f–k they’re talking about, to be honest with you. So it didn’t create an issue.”
The topic came up due to the WrestleSlam hosts wondering if some of the AEW talent being EVP’s could lead to clashes creatively. Bischoff believes that would not be the case because, in the end, the buck stops with Tony Khan.
“As far as AEW goes, as far as I know, Tony Khan is the one that’s calling the shots,” Bischoff said. “Look, you’re always going to have conflict, not necessarily negative conflict, but people are fighting for attention, they’re fighting for TV time, they’re competing for promotion. Any time you have that level of competition among high caliber people, it’s going to get challenging from time to time. Whether you give them a title of EVP or whether they have something in their contract that says meaningful consultation, or if a bunch of people had creative control, that would obviously create a lot of challenges.
“But I don’t think the challenge that people are talking about really exists in AEW today. That’s my guess. I’m not behind the scenes, so I could be dead wrong. I know enough of the people involved and the little bit of that I do know about AEW from the inside, which is not a lot, Tony Khan is calling those shots. And as long as Tony Khan is calling the shots, it will be challenging but it will be manageable.”
