Some of WWE’s top superstars have made successful transitions into Hollywood. John Cena, Dwayne Johnson, and Dave Bautista have navigated the WWE into successful careers in Hollywood, though more could have been possible.
Lisa Marie Varon spoke to Wrestling Inc. recently and revealed that WWE has withheld information from Hollywood and other opportunities for stars, WWE wanting their stars to have a primary focus on wrestling. They felt taking those opportunities would cause their interest to divert into other areas.
“Oh, absolutely. Sometimes shows will go like this, ‘I want this character,’ and they’re like, ‘How about this character?’ So whoever they want to push a little bit is going to get the spot sometimes. You get a lot of requests that you don’t know about, until you go do some signings. They’re like, ‘Oh, I contacted WWE about this for you,’ and I’m like, ‘Oh, what did they say?’ Either they never got back to them, or they recommended somebody.”
“I think back in my day, they wanted us to full-on focus on wrestling. So then, later on towards the end of WWE, that’s when they started pushing people like Kane doing his movie, [John] Cena and The Rock. All that kind of stuff started happening. I think I was maybe late in the game for the females. Awesome that it’s finally happening.”
WWE has always tried to control their talent in ways a company that had their talent under contract would, despite them being signed and treated like independent contractors. Those details and news like this become far more scrutinized with all the talk of unionization lately and how they’ve tried to take even more control of opportunities outside professional wrestling come up for them. That could change in the future.
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