MLW Anti-Trust Lawsuit Against WWE Update

As noted before, Major League Wrestling’s original antitrust lawsuit against WWE was dismissed this past February and had filed a new amended lawsuit this past March.

Fightful’s Jeremy Lambert reported that WWE filed a motion on Friday to the U.S. District Court, California Northern District (San Jose) requesting for MLW’s amended lawsuit against them to be officially dismissed.

In the filing, WWE is claiming that MLW has still “failed to allege antitrust claims for monopolization or attempted monopolization.” The filing also stated that MLW’s claims of WWE currently owning 92% of the wrestling market would not mean that if they were to cease operations that other promotions would gain all of the revenue WWE once received.

In the filing, WWE also stated that MLW’s claims of them blocking other promotions from being able to secure television deals are not true.

WWE also responded to MLW’s issue of their ownership of talents’ IP and rights stating:

“[A] federal district court has already ruled that WWE’s ownership interest in the characters delineated on its television product are as legitimate as DC’s ownership interest in Superman. At base, MLW is grousing that it cannot develop its own characters and would prefer to steal WWE’s copyrighted characters… Indeed, even during the course of this litigation, WWE has had to send MLW a cease and desist letter regarding its attempted theft of the ‘Enzo Amore’ character owned by WWE.”

WWE also stated that they did not play any role in REELZ’s decision to sign a deal with Peacock since REELZ could have signed with other streaming services to ensure MLW’s programming could air on their services.

“MLW does not allege that WWE prevents it from selling its media rights to Reelz, nor that Reelz could distribute only through Peacock rather than, e.g., Amazon Prime, Roku, Pluto, Apple TV, or other platforms potential number of purchasers, it cannot escape the reality that WWE only sells its media rights to two of the many potential purchasers of MLW’s content.”