Nobody should need the definition of insanity to be explained to them at this stage, but Dwayne Johnson evidently didn’t care when he decided that the risk of relaunching the seemingly-cursed XFL football league for a third time was worth the investment.
History certainly isn’t on the brand’s side, though, with the alternative to the NFL having failed to make it past a single season in both of its previous iterations. It was Johnson’s former boss Vince McMahon who took a massive financial loss on the risky gambit more than two decades apart, with the folding of both the first and second versions hitting the WWE boss in the pocket to the tune of an eye-watering $100 million.
Of course, Johnson is confident and savvy enough to know that he can’t take anything for granted regardless of whether or not third time proves to be the charm, but with XFL 3.0 reaching the playoffs, he’s made a promise that it isn’t going to follow in the footsteps of its predecessors and go down as a “one-and-done” failure for a third consecutive time.
It’s ironic that The Rock is recently coming off the most high-profile “one-and-done” disaster of his entire career after Black Adam under-performed at the box office, flopped with critics, and saw the actor and producer’s plans for an entire expanded universe of sequels, spinoffs, and crossovers cut off at the knees as soon as James Gunn and Peter Safran were named as co-CEOs of DC Studios, but that’s no doubt only emboldened him to ensure that lightning won’t strike twice in quick succession when it comes to the XFL.
Published: Apr 23, 2023 02:34 am