The Wrestling Observer is reporting that the story that made headlines yesterday about WWE looking to sell their video library to Warner Bros. is – as predicted – indeed not true.
TheWrap.com – who posted the “exclusive” story – got the basics of the story wrong as apparently the whole deal is about Warner Bros. acquiring the rights to distribute WWE home video from the current rights owner, Cinedigm.
Upon further research, Adam Mizel, the Chief Operating Officer at Cinedigm, said during an August conference call with investors that WWE will leave them at the end of the year as they did not accept a renewal proposal that allowed the company earn an acceptable return.
“This was an easy decision for us as WWE has underperformed expectations and is at best now a lower volume breakeven customer,” said Mizel when discussing the Q1 2014 results of his company.
When asked to expand on his WWE comments and if their expectations were just lower than they wanted or if they were in the negative, Mizel added that business over the past two years declined a lot “as they have shifted their business model accordingly.”
“We made a proposal to them that we thought was profitable and made sense for us and should make sense for them. They didn’t want to do that. They were looking for a deal that I think would have relied on us – at us losing money and we are not in the business of servicing customers while we lose money,” Mizel said.
