“Scooby Doo” star Freddie Prinze Jr. got a special look at the ins and outs of running a professional wrestling event as a WWE writer. Prinze has even talked about opening a wrestling promotion in the past. On a new episode of “Wrestling With Freddie,” Prinze said that conversations with networks about the possible federation are not going as swimmingly as he’d hoped.
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“I went out to…Warner [Bros] Discovery, which was the worst meeting out of all of them,” Prinze said, noting that WBD executives wanted a reality show and nothing more from Prinze. “I gave the same pitch to everyone else. It was the only place that didn’t work.”
Prinze also took his pitch to “Dark Side of the Ring” proprietor Vice. Unfortunately, the media company wasn’t in a place to do anything with their enthusiasm for the pitch.
“They were going under some business restructuring…and they couldn’t afford the show,” Prinze said, lamenting that he couldn’t capitalize on the “Dark Side of the Ring” audience. “There were a couple other places where the meetings went well but I feel like I wasn’t pitching to people high enough on the totem pole to get the idea heard by the top dogs.”
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Prinze says an unnamed streamer asked his wife, Sarah Michelle Gellar, about Prinze’s interest in wrestling, and she made the connection.
“The original pitch was a documentary about trying to pull this off,” Prinze said, as he felt it was hard to pitch a straight pro wrestling program, meaning the pro wrestling show would end up being the two-hour finale of the documentary. “I sit and I talk to this new company and they’re not interested in the documentary at all. They want a professional wrestling promotion.”
‘It’s still a long road’
According to Prinze, the financing process was “unorthodox” but he remained open-minded in the name of getting things done, only to realize the process might not be feasible in the current corporate-owned Hollywood system.
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“To create something new in the corporate world…is borderline impossible,” Prinze said, bemoaning current marketing executives.
“You have to provide everything…So that is the world we live in,” Prinze said. “Existing in that world, I come to the cold realization that I can’t start it from scratch.”
This realization has led Prinze to an unnamed person who recommended that Prinze not build a wrestling promotion, but instead use his cache and connections to help an existing independent promotion to get a television deal, and then Prinze’s promotion would exist within that promotion like ROH exists within AEW.
“So I start sitting down and thinking about that and I start looking at the rosters,” Prinze said, “and I start weighing the pros and cons…My main guy, my right hand liked the same one I liked for all the same reasons.”
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Prinze was connected with the promotion via Zoom. Prinze had no desire to change their promotion and instead started pitching how to get the promotion’s current talent over with mainstream audiences. The two parted ways and Prinze was texted by a wrestler at the behest of the promoter, and soon the promotion was meeting with the streamer.
“It’s still a long road…I am doing my damndest to make this work,” Prinze said. “You have to be ready when opportunity comes.”
