5 Events that led to WWE winning the Monday Night War

#1 David Arquette wins the WCW World Title (April 25, 2000)

David Arquette wins the WCW World title on the April 25 episode of WCW Thunder

There were many reasons why WWE won the Monday Night War, but the focal one was a situation totally of WCW's own making. On April 25, 2000, on an episode of WCW's secondary weekly show, Thunder, Vince Russo booked diminutive actor David Arquette to win the WCW World title.

The then-husband of Friends star Courteney Cox and star of Scream had appeared on previous episodes of Monday Nitro to help promote the WCW movie Ready to Rumble, in which he played a starring role. However, Russo took the tie-in too far, when he booked Arquetag-team tag team bout with WCW World Champion, Diamond Dallas Page versus Jeff Jarrett and Eric Bischoff.

The stipulation was that whoever scored the pin would win the belt. When Arquette pinned Bischoff, he became the champion. Not only was Arquette as champion a ludicrous decision but the way he won it was nonsensical. Arquette won the belt from his own team member, DDP and thus did not defeat the champion to win. The decision alienated a vast amount of WCW's loyal fan-base. Many of whom burned their WCW merchandise and vowed to never watch the promotion again. Many fans stuck to their word.

Viewers abandoned WCW in droves, as ratings live attendance, house show attendance and pay-per-view buyrates fell through the floor in the week's following Arquette's title win. WCW never regained the trust of it's fan-base, despite its product producing much-improved programming at the turn of the year. However, after a $62 million loss in 2000, WCW would never receive another opportunity from TNT to turn their fortunes around. Many observers cite Russo as the man that killed WCW.

That is debatable but what is certain, is that provided the final nail in the coffin. Unfortunately, he didn't learn from his mistakes and despite the Arquette debacle almost destroying the company singlehandedly, Russo decided to make himself WCW World Champion a few short months later. The Russo title win can't be included as a reason for WCW's demise however, as no-one was watching anymore by the time of his crowning moment. Months of his short-sighted, ridiculous booking saw to that.