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There are no plans to return to New York City after they barely drew 200 or so at the Elmcor Rec Center. The promotion took out localized cable ads and did flyering at local events, including the ROH show the weekend before but really needed the locals in the Corona area (where the show was) to come out full force and that didn't happen. I am sure the intense heat that night didn't help as I knew a few readers who were going but blew the show off as they didn't want to deal with traveling in those conditions.
The DVDs of both New York City (excellent show) and Philadelphia (very good, solid show) are available for pre-orders at www.extremerising.com.
The weekend overall was very, very good in terms of resetting the company and showing the type of product they can put on. As I wrote Friday night, I wish the Queens event could have taken place in front of the 4/28 crowd. It was excellent and really serviced the "ECW legacy" or whatever you want to term it.
The backstage morale was much better this weekend as well, and that was with a New Jack vs. Balls Mahoney incident. There was a feeling that those who were there for the party and not for the show were gone and everyone was looking to redeem the negative reports of the first show. Among management, the feeling was that the Internet made the first show much worse than it was. The wrestlers took the tact that the first show didn't work and they needed to make this one work if the project was going to go further.
Financially, the weekend did not do as well as the 4/28 weekend. With the poor NYC crowd and the Philadelphia crowd down, there were no bonuses for talent this time around. The way the company has pay structured, talent gets x (whatever they agreed upon) for a date and a little less than x for additional dates the same weekend. If the crowds do well and there is a surplus, there's a bonus involved.
While Philadephia was down to around 900, everyone involved was happy with that number considering the reaction of the live crowd last night and since so many traveled from outside of the area for the show (including fans from UK, Germany, Canada and Japan) who weren't coming back. The company wasn't happy with the turnout in NYC. Joel Maximo of Los Dramaticos was involved with the street promotion there.
The promotion handed out a lot of make-goods for fans who held the first row tickets at the debut event, including comps and replacement signed chairs, so that cut into the profits as well. The feeling was that the company had to take the loss to show the audience that they respected them and show they were manning up.
Bestia 666 is moving to California and becoming an American citizen so expect him to be a regular going forward once that takes place.
One thing that the promotion may want to think about is their strategy of running so many different places. Shane Douglas has constantly compared the early days of this project to the early days of ECW. Well, ECW in that era ran one market and one building. Rising might be better suited to run the same market every 6-7 weeks as opposed to going to Cleveland, Buffalo, etc. as the new audiences aren't going to be emotionally connected to characters, storylines, etc. and with each market (as NYC showed), they really need to have someone strong there to handle the marketing and promotion on the ground level or else it's such a huge wasted expense.
Original ECW music writer Harry Slash was visiting at the NYC event.
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