Former WWE Superstar Mickie James believes that the company's first-ever all-female pay-per-view was set up to fail due to a lack of promotion.
While appearing on a recent edition of The Wrestling Inc. Daily show, James opened up about her experience as a member of WWE's women's division and spoke about the alleged viewership of the Evolution pay-per-view, which went down on October 28, 2018, at the Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum, in Uniondale, New York.
“I thought we had made such a monumental stride by announcing Evolution,” James said. “We all thought it was the start of something really, really cool.”
James then claimed that the reason the event underperformed was that it wasn't promoted as much as other WWE pay-per-views.
“It was only really promoted for a month. The matches weren’t even announced but a week or two before. There was zero promotion or marketing,” James recalled. “It was almost set up to fail. If there was as much energy and focus put into it as perhaps some of the other events, and made and highlighted how monumental this actually is, perhaps that wouldn’t be true.”
Mickie James is hoping to avoid making the same mistakes as WWE in the build-up to the upcoming all-female NWA pay-per-view that she is booking.
“We hope it’s the first of many,” James said of NWA EMPOWERRR, “I really want to make this something unique and special and a way to highlight the women in a different way you don’t necessarily see on modern television today. I think there’s a cool way to do that from a female perspective.”
As you might recall, Mickie James was released by WWE back in April, allegedly due to budget cuts necessitated by the Covis-19 pandemic.
"I would really love to do something in the female brand perspective," James told Renee Paquette on Oral Sessions in the wake of her release. "If I was going to tie myself to something, that's what I would sink my teeth into. From a space of like developing a cool show that is based around women and empowers and lifts them up. That's what I'm working on and focusing on," she continued