Kevin Nash says trying to figure out how much money WWE actually makes from its merchandise has become almost impossible—and he thinks today’s royalty statements leave talent almost completely in the dark.
While speaking on the Kliq This podcast, Nash was asked whether being featured on the cover of a WWE video game resulted in a bigger royalty payment. Instead of talking about game covers, the conversation quickly shifted to how dramatically WWE’s royalty statements have changed over the years. According to Nash, the detailed reports wrestlers used to receive have all but disappeared.
“The actual breakdown that you receive is so… like in the old days, the breakdown was—I was talking to Lita, Amy, about this—we were talking about it. It was like when you used to get your royalty statement, it was literally 50 pages thick. Now it’s like three.”
Nash said that’s because today’s statements don’t show the kind of itemized information they once did. Instead, performers receive broad categories like “nWo intellectual property,” making it difficult to work out how much revenue WWE actually generated before calculating each wrestler’s share. Even then, Nash says the math still doesn’t add up in his mind.
“Yeah. It says like ‘nWo intellectual property’ and it has your percentage and what you make. And then if you take that and say, in my example—I’ll round it up to make the math easier—I get 20%. Which means that the total revenue would be another four times what I get. So let’s say if I got $10,000 for an item…They would have made 50, right? And when you do it on a lot of items, you’re like, ‘Fuck if I would give both of my kidneys if that’s all they’re making.'”
Nash compared the situation to Hollywood accounting, where expenses can significantly change the numbers performers ultimately see.
“It’s the same as when you start getting backends on movies or books. You look at what the publisher’s expenses are.”
Asked what wrestlers can realistically do if they question those figures, Nash admitted there aren’t many options.
“You just got to kind of roll with it… What are you going to do? Are you going to order forensic accounting?”
Whether it’s video games, merchandise or licensing deals, Nash believes one thing has changed the most over the years: today’s royalty statements tell wrestlers far less than they used to, leaving them with little way of knowing exactly how much money their names and likenesses are bringing in.
What do you think of Kevin Nash’s comments about WWE’s royalty statements? Let us know in the comments below.
Please credit Ringside News if you use the above transcript in your publication.
