What was WWE thinking with this Money in the Bank poster?

WWE added another notch to its “tone-deaf” ledger with this baffling promotional poster for Money in the Bank.

For anyone holding out hope that WWE would exhibit an inkling of self-awareness after this week, its Money in the Bank announcement should permanently erase that impulse from your brain.

The plans for the pay-per-view’s eponymous match seems benign in a vacuum: the participating wrestlers will fight throughout the building in a rat race to the top of “Titan Tower” to retrieve the Money in the Bank briefcase and a guaranteed championship match over the next year — an obvious attempt to re-capture the magic that the Boneyard and Firefly Funhouse matches caught at WrestleMania 36.

Of course, that requires you to ignore that this will force the talent to travel to Stamford, CT in the middle of a global pandemic to film this thing — if they haven’t done so already — but again, this company has about as much shame as Ricky Davis missing a free throw on purpose to try and record a triple-double.

It made that crystal clear with this promotional poster created to hype this show up:

Now, if this edition of the show took place under literally any other circumstance, one could write this off as some lame lampshade hanging on WWE’s part, but after a week in which it virtually bribed the Florida state government to continue running live shows — which they promptly changed course on — and released/furloughed over 52 onscreen and backstage workers to boost its profit margins, crafting a poster that not-so-subtly alludes to wrestlers sacrificing their health and quality of life for the fiscal betterment of a multi-billion dollar enterprise exceeds obtuseness.

So, what was WWE thinking with this poster? Well, if you’ve followed WWE critically over the years, the answer is obvious: it and the people who run it don’t care.

Otherwise, it wouldn’t have jettisoned all the wrestlers, producers, announcers, and trainers that it did, especially considering that it didn’t have to. Nor would Linda McMahon have spent $18.5 million from her Super PAC in Florida to basically ensure her husband Vince’s company could resume operations as an “essential business”. And a company that cared certainly wouldn’t designate the wrestlers it hasn’t discarded as independent contractors to avoid providing benefits to them.

Clearly, WWE believes that it’s Teflon, thinking that anyone who still sticks with it after everything the company did over the last six days will continue watching no matter what. In some respect, it’s right: fans still want to support to hard work the wrestlers put in regardless of the promotion’s misdeeds. And, of course, there will always be a hive of callous fans who will defend WWE’s actions so long as they get their weekly dose of new content.

But the more WWE chips away at its perceived invulnerability with nonsense like this, the harder it becomes to keep them from sticking to the company in a way that won’t scrub away so easily. Which means it better find some self-awareness, and find it quickly.