Wrestling videos and DVDs are to be a thing of the past, with WWE Home Video shutting its UK operations.
Wrestling videos – long a mainstay of the home entertainment industry outside of the film category – have long been hugely popular with grappling fans, as well as offering up a nice cash injection to the WWE. Sadly though, they’re to become a thing of the past after the WWE pulled out of physical media releases.
First VHS and latterly on DVD and then Blu-ray, WWE titles were particularly popular in the UK and helped boost the growth of wrestling on these shores.
But the new ownership of the organisation – the WWE and UFC came together in 2023 and now operate under the business banner of TKO – has decided that the physical media era has ended.
Its decision is a global one and came before the announcement that TKO and Netflix had signed on the dotted line. The Netflix deal means that Raw and, in the UK and other territories outside the US, other WWE flagships such as Smackdown and Wrestlemania will appear on the streaming service. That deal is said to be worth some $5bn.
The deal will swell TKO’s coffers, but it has knock-on effects elsewhere. Media giant Fremantle’s home entertainment arm had been handling releases in the UK for more than a decade, taking over from indie Silver Vision which had pioneered WWF on video in the UK, as it was initially known until a legal spat with the World Wildlife Fund (wrestling had the spat, not the UK.)
Fremantle is now shuttering its home entertainment arm. It comes as WWE titles in this country continued to buck home entertainment trends, showing growth in recent years.
As the company’s Ken Law told industry newsletter The Raygun: “our new releases have been regularly charting top ten, and even top five, and our overall market share has increased consistently since 2019. We’ve been doing everything right in a tough market. There was much more life left in the home entertainment sector for WWE in the UK. Sadly, it’s not to be and we face the premature end of the WWE Home Video label after 11 years with Fremantle and 38 years of physical home entertainment releasing in the UK. It’s very sad and is truly the end of an era.”
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