“Who Killed WCW?” Documentary Creator Addresses The Rock’s Involvement

The Rock never worked for WCW, but the creator of a new documentary says the People’s Champion was heavily involved in putting together the four-part documentary series.

Since World Championship Wrestling’s demise in March 2001, there have been many documentaries done about the end of the company. Some of those documentaries have been produced by WWE themselves, which led to frustrations by some fans since they didn’t always tell the story in a fair way.

Wrestling fans will get their chance to sample a new documentary because WWE legend The Rock and his production company Seven Bucks Production have put together a four-part documentary series titled “Who Killed WCW?” along with the creators of the popular “Dark Side of the Ring” series. The series will premiere on Tuesday, June 4th at 10 pm on VICE.

Evan Husney produces the “Dark Side of the Ring” shows with Jason Eisener. Husney spoke to Fightful about the creation of the series along with Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s production company getting involved.

“We thought maybe we could do it like, you know, the final years of WCW as a subject and it started, we just got so excited with this idea that we’re like, wait, maybe this could be its own series for television.

“Then we’d done Tales from the Territories with Seven Bucks, Dwayne Johnson’s production company, and VICE wanted to continue that collaboration. So just kind of these two perfect things like, ‘Well, what about this? Would you guys be interested in doing this doc about the sort of the last years of WCW?’ Seven Bucks was all on board, VICE was all on board and then we were off to the races and we only started filming it in December. So it’s a very quick turnaround.”

The Rock Was Enthusiastic About “Death Of WCW” Documentary

As Husney continued, he spoke about The Rock’s excitement about the documentary and how the People’s Champion wanted to be interviewed for it.

“It was nothing we really planned on, per se, in terms of having The Rock sit down for an interview. But it just, as we started sending him cuts of the episodes, he was so enthusiastic about them and he loved that first episode, and he’s like, I wanna sit down for this. We’re like, ‘Awesome.’ It actually worked out more so in a practical way, because most of the people we interviewed for this had lived through the demise of WCW, and that was the whole point of this, by the way.”

“The whole point was to not go the WWE framework because, you know, victors rewrite history and we didn’t want to go down that path. It doesn’t really get into—like it touches on it, but it doesn’t really get into how—the WWE fought back in the Monday Night Wars and stuff. It touches on that briefly. So it doesn’t get into the DX invasion and all that stuff. But anyway, we needed somebody to speak enthusiastically about the good days of WCW, and nobody involved with WCW these days is gonna speak enthusiastically about it. They’re all kind of dejected, you know?”

It was also noted by Husney that The Rock also played a key role in talking about the perspective of the Monday Night Wars from WWE’s side.

“So we needed a hype man. We needed somebody to put all this over and to talk about when it was good, how great it was and there’s nobody better than The Rock to really do that.”

“He also did touch on what his perspective was from the other side seeing how when WCW was kicking their ass like, ‘Whoa, we need to be inspired by this and we need to go more in that direction. I think it all worked out.”

In a bit of WCW trivia, some fans may not realize that even though The Rock never worked for WCW, he was actually the second last man to win the WCW World Title.

The last time WWE fans saw The Rock was on Raw after WrestleMania 40 when he told Cody Rhodes he would be coming back for him some day down the road.