“I wish I could tell you the real stories. Holy shit!”
The opening line by Vince McMahon in the new Netflix documentary series “Mr. McMahon” sums up basically the whole story. The six-part series directed by “Tiger King” executive producer Chris Smith tries to do something everyone else hasn’t been able to do: tell the whole story of the world’s most famous professional wrestling promoter.
Unfortunately, “Mr. McMahon” is unsuccessful in that goal because there are so many things McMahon won’t reveal. Not even in a documentary series named after him.
“I don’t wanna tell you these stories. I’ll give you enough that it’s semi-interesting,” he says.
When it comes to McMahon, even semi-interesting is good enough most of the time. As McMahon says in the first episode this is the first documentary focusing on him where he has been involved. During his 40-year-plus career, he has rarely given exclusive interviews even though people have watched his performances on their televisions for decades.
The numbers don’t lie and they spell great success for “Mr. McMahon.” It was released on September 25, and it was globally the fourth most watched TV show on Netflix in its release week. It garnered nearly five million views in five days.
So, who is Vince McMahon and why are so many people interested in him?
Vincent Kennedy McMahon is a 79-year-old businessman who has unquestionably accomplished more than anyone else in the world of professional wrestling. His father, Vince McMahon Sr., founded the company that is now known as World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), to which the junior bought the business in 1982. For over 40 years, McMahon operated as the owner of the company and destroyed most of his competitors one after another in the process. Creating superstars such as Hulk Hogan, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, John Cena, “Stone Cold” Steve Austin and Dave Bautista, McMahon helped professional wrestling achieve a level of popularity no one could have predicted.
At the same time, McMahon played the role of a vicious boss known as “Mr. McMahon,” on his shows for decades. He was one of the most-despised characters by wrestling fans year after year.
The long-time owner played the role so convincingly that it seemed like Mr. McMahon was not just a character. Many people in the business believe that Vince McMahon is Mr. McMahon, just as vicious as the persona he’s portraying. There are a huge number of controversies surrounding McMahon, and the documentary tries to go through as many of them as possible.
McMahon in real life was involved in a huge steroid trial, accused of multiple crimes, screwed his own world champion Bret Hart out of a title in front of a live crowd, decided to keep the show going on after one of the wrestlers died in the middle of the ring, declined any responsibility when one of the wrestlers committed double-murder and suicide… The list goes on and on.
Even with all the controversy surrounding McMahon, the great man of the professional wrestling industry continued his path endlessly and – as told in the documentary – had no plans of retiring ever. Until June 2022, when The Wall Street Journal revealed that McMahon had agreed to pay $12 million in hush money to four women, two of whom alleged sexual misconduct against McMahon. At first, this seemed to be it for McMahon’s career. He announced his retirement and stepped down as the CEO of the company even though remained on the board of directors.
The unthinkable happened in January 2023: McMahon returned to his position as the executive chairman of the company after WWE’s internal investigation into the hush money payments was completed. For a while it looked like McMahon was able to survive even the accusations of sexual misconduct.
Then The Wall Street Journal published another article: “Vince McMahon Accused of Sex Trafficking by WWE Staffer He Paid to Keep Quiet.” Janel Grant, a former employee at WWE headquarters, had filed a lawsuit against McMahon, accusing him of coercing her into a sexual relationship, sexually trafficking and sexually assaulting her. Grant alleged that she was subjected to “extreme cruelty and degradation” by McMahon. She provided multiple text messages as proof. A couple of days later federal authorities in New York launched an investigation into sexual assault and sex trafficking allegations made against McMahon. The investigation is still going on.
After the extreme accusations, McMahon resigned from the company and sold his stocks.
The events Grant described had already happened when Vince McMahon gave his interviews for the Netflix documentary in 2021. Knowing that, you can’t be thinking about what he had in his mind when he says the line: “I wish I could tell you the real stories. Holy shit!”
Maybe that is the reason McMahon is the one person who isn’t happy about the success of the documentary. A couple of days before the film’s release, McMahon attacked the series with a post on X. McMahon wrote that the producers of the series used “out of context footage and dated soundbites” to “distort the viewers’ perception and support a deceptive narrative.” Reportedly, McMahon even tried to buy the rights of the series to bury it before anybody could see it.
McMahon’s reaction tells something about how exceptional a piece “Mr. McMahon” is when considering its production. As the series states, most of the interviews were done in 2021, before the latest controversies. For some reason, the program was released just three years later.
The interesting question is: What were the original intentions of the creators?
Because huge things happened in real life, they ended up doing a documentary which has the climax of the main character resigning from the company and dropping out of the series, but they couldn’t know that when they started working on the series.
Clearly, McMahon had expected the piece to be much more favorable towards him, maybe even a kind of advertisement about his greatness.
Was the original idea just to tell the same wrestling stories that have been told multiple times in other documentaries – this time with the help of the man himself? Maybe. But between 2021 and 2024, there were huge changes going on – not just in McMahon’s life, but also behind the scenes.
When the production began, McMahon still owned WWE and the company was signed on as a co-producer of the documentary, implying that it would have a degree of influence over how the then-chairman would be portrayed. WWE has since had its name removed from the credits.
In January 2024, Netflix made a $5 billion deal for the exclusive right of streaming WWE’s flagship show “Raw.” The broadcast starts on Netflix – conveniently enough – in January 2025, just a couple of months after the documentary.
Since McMahon’s departure, WWE has made its best efforts to assure fans that there’s now a so-called new era, which won’t be stained with similar scandals than it was with Vince McMahon. The main people now behind the company are McMahon’s son-in-law, former wrestler Paul “Triple H” Levesque and businessman Nick Khan.
You can’t resist the thought that putting out a six-part series about sensations of the former owner is a really good PR stunt for the streaming service which most definitely hopes to have a scandal-free future with WWE. Luckily enough, they had the material for the documentary that had been filmed when McMahon himself was still involved in the project.
The outcome is an interesting documentary in its own right. The series hints about the accusations towards McMahon in the first episode but comes back to them just in the final half of the last episode. At that point, it turns into a kind of meta-documentary: a documentary about finishing the whole thing after new accusations and McMahon’s retreat from the project.
We probably need to wait for the federal investigation to be ready and the consequences of that before there’s even a possibility of doing an actual true-crime series about McMahon.
The series’ ending is executed quite well but it leaves viewers craving for more — for the actual piece about McMahon’s darkest secrets.