Pro wrestling legend Jim Cornette recently took to an episode of his Jim Cornette Experience podcast, where he talked about a variety of topics such as how the pro wrestling business has changed over the past 70 years, especially when it comes to making money.

Jim Cornette said:

“Well, somebody was just saying that, you know, these numbers are getting up to the point where if, you know, Bill’s network is going to pay a billion dollars to some organization to carry their programming for three or four years, and they can buy the organization and own everything forward and backward for three or four times that why the f*ck not, at this point. These numbers are insane.”

“I was talking to a media person the other day, who is a younger person and had no idea that television stations didn’t pay wrestling promotions in the territory days anything. Well, you know, Memphis got 1500 bucks a week and the production in the studio. Most promotions didn’t get paid, they didn’t get paid since back in the days of network television in the early 50s. So that was non-existent, they subsisted on ticket sales, merchandising was nil.”

“Now it’s completely reversed, where you get more money from the television stations, networks than you do for anything else. And there’s fewer people than ever buying tickets, but they spend more on merchandise per head. So it’s completely turned upside down.”

You can check out Jim Cornette’s full comments at this link. H/T to TJRWrestling for transcribing the above quotes.