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SmackDown viewership suffers big drop, WWE stock, CIO pessimistic about network, Big Show movie pic

Smackdown viewership dropped

- Last night's episode of WWE SmackDown averaged 2.338 million viewers, down 13% from last week's 2.642 million viewers.

- WWE stock was up slightly today, rising 0.60% to close at $13.50.

- Benzinga has an article here with Lemelson Capital Management Chief Investment Officer Emmanuel Lemelson discussing WWE. His firm sold all but one share of WWE last February. Lemelson noted that while Vince McMahon deserves credit for jumping on OTT, the fact that the WWE Network still has under 1 million paying subscribers (WWE averaged 927,000 paid subscribers for the first quarter of 2015) is a bad sign.

"It doesn't look good for the OTT network, it's a huge source of costs that is draining the company, which is already performing very badly financially, it's important not to confuse the fervor of the fans and their feelings about the brand with wise fiscal management, which the company needs very badly, but increasingly is probably out of reach because of corporate governance issues," Lemelson said. "If you have to be on one side of the trade, it's probably safer to be on the short side."

- As noted yesterday, WWE Studios' Vendetta, which stars Big Show and Dean Cain, will hit theaters and On Demand on June 12th. The movie is directed by The Soska Twins, who also directed See No Evil 2. You can check out a photo from the movie below:

 

 

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