ROH Action Figure Deal May Cause WWE To Be Careful About Signing Talent

[cero2k]

Source: f4wonline.com

There were some people internally at the top very unhappy when the word came out about ROH and Figures Toy Company releasing the Kevin Steen action figure, with the idea a non-WWE company is going to be first to the marketplace in releasing an action figure of WWE's hottest new star, or for that matter, anyone that is on Raw in a featured role. The other is that the look and character of the ROH Kevin Steen and the WWE Kevin Owens are essentially the same.

The doctrine is to keep this from happening again. So now the pressure is on Paul Levesque and that department to get guys who have potential to some day be big players into NXT and signed to merchandising deals before they go to a company (ROH or TNA) that has merchandising deals and national cable deals in North America, and create a pipeline to find the ones with potential before ROH & TNA.

A lot of indie talent, including the names noted in the past few weeks, had signed five-year deals with Figure Toy Company, so that company has the right to market Kevin Steen merchandise for nearly five more years while he may be pushed as one of WWE's biggest stars. And WWE doesn't want this to happen again. For this reason, the doctrine is not to sign talent from ROH or TNA now for the main roster, and get the word out to young talent that if they have WWE aspirations, not to sign with either TNA (which most of the top young guys had heard) or ROH (which is new). One person noted to this that all this came about because the Figure Toy Company deal and the Destination America deals for ROH came down at about the same time, and WWE had no knowledge of either of them. There will always be exceptions made to that rule, as with every rule. They may not have this doctrine for NXT given the idea WWE could be interested in some talent whose contracts are expiring from TNA for NXT, since that's not WWE Raw and people wouldn't have merch rights for guys on Raw every week. While some would find this confusing, if you look at it from a WWE perspective with Mattel, they can't be happy that a rival company has the rights to merchandise the talent they are supposed to have exclusive rights on, and that the rival company has those rights for years to come. But WWE absolutely is trying to keep talent with potential away from ROH in particular for this reason and also because of the ROH getting those deals as well as the feeling ROH and NXT are competition for a similar customer base. The new concept of NXT that is no longer developmental is to deliver something somewhat similar as far as athletic talent on top that ROH does, and cater to the same fan base. This is actually a pretty major story right now.

[Big Red Machine]

I was skeptical when ROH signed the toy deal (because who buys ROH toys?)... but now it just seems like a worse move. I hope they are getting good money from the toy company for this.

Well... seems like this has been a good day for Mr. Sapolsky, hasn't it?

[cero2k]

from ROH's perspective, it wasn't a bad move until WWE tried to cockblock them for something so irrelevant. typical wwe

[Big Red Machine]

from ROH's perspective, it wasn't a bad move until WWE tried to cockblock them for something so irrelevant. typical wwe

Unless they are paying money for a product no one will ever buy (like the Fillsinger card game)