In 2014, Nigel McGuinness tried to change wrestling by launching his own promotion through Kickstarter.
Nigel McGuinness retired from wrestling in 2011. His career hadn’t gone as planned, as an old bicep injury cost him his dream of wrestling in the WWE. He did find success, albeit briefly, in TNA. His matches against Kurt Angle put him on the radar of millions of fans, and he was close to breaking into the main event.
But then Hulk Hogan and company took over and sent him back down to the midcard. To make matters worse, a Hepatitis B diagnosis forced him to stop wrestling until he was eventually released by TNA a year later. This was a far cry from his ROH run, where he was among the top wrestlers in the world (Check out Nigel McGuinness’ best matches by clicking this link).
Soon after that, he received the all-clear. Nigel McGuinness embarked on a retirement tour, which he documented in “The Last of McGuinness”. However, he wasn’t done with the sport of professional wrestling. In retirement, Nigel McGuinness sought to raise the funds to change the sport entirely.
Nigel McGuinness Launched A Kickstarter For A Wrestling TV Show Called ‘LA Fights’
In 2014 Nigel McGuinness launched a Kickstarter campaign to release a “complete reworking of the genre” of professional wrestling.
He wrote a six-episode script for a new show called “LA Fights”, a Los Angeles-based pro wrestling TV show. He stated that it wasn’t planned to be competition for promotions like WWE and TNA, but something completely different entirely.
McGuinness saw the show as breaking new ground, not just in wrestling but in the television world completely. He saw LA Fights as moving pro wrestling towards shows like Breaking Bad, The Office and UFC all rolled into one package. He saw the project as inspired by UFC but still focused on the traditional pro-wrestling roots.
Alcatraz actor Jonny Coyne praised the content of LA Fights, explaining how it “combined drama, sport and documentary-style filmmaking into one unique piece. As an actor that’s the stuff you want to.”
In what way these would come together we do not know. McGuinness did speak about the potential storylines in the show in a Reddit AMA and in his Kickstarter video, revealing things like drug abuse, depression and sexuality would be explored in a way never before seen in wrestling.
It was an exciting proposal. The season-based style of regular TV in the pro wrestling sphere had been attempted successfully by Lucha Underground around that time, but Nigel assured fans that LA Fights would be a much different, more easily accessible product for the masses to get into.
It’s unknown exactly how the show would have looked. The show’s synopsis described the plot as “a group of amateur fighters [who] struggle to coexist with their morally ambivalent promoter in an upstart LA-based fight league“, which gives us some clues as to the nature of the show.
LA Fights sounds like the action may be closer to MMA than wrestling, with the scripted nature of the show bridging the gap between the two. Each episode would be 45 minutes long but feature much more action outside the ring than in it. McGuinness bluntly told fans that if they wanted traditional wrestling, this show is not for them.
Nigel McGuinness’ vision for the show would be a positive for wrestlers too. Not only will it help fans of MMA get more into pro wrestling, but also be safer for wrestlers. He didn’t want wrestlers taking bumps as you’d never take a bump in a real fight. That gives an insight into what the action in the show could look like.
It sounded like a great idea for a new television series. The Englishman needed just $370,000 to film the entire series, much less than the $500,000 the average TV pilot takes to make. After the success of The Last Of McGuinness there seemed like a real chance that wrestling could be changed forever with LA Fights.
Then it wasn’t.
LA Fights Failed To Get Funded Via Kickstarter
The project was launched on December 15th 2014 and showed promise at first. By the 23rd of December, they had raised $15,000, which was a third of what The Last of McGuinness raised in its entire run.
However, the project failed to receive the interest it needed to get the green light. When it closed on February 2nd 2015, LA Fights had only managed $76,000 of the $370,000 total amount needed. It was a huge amount of money but TV is an expensive business and sadly McGuinness wasn’t able to break in with this project.
Nigel McGuinness was disappointed by missing out on the funding but did not give up hope. In a statement posted after the Kickstarter ended, he thanked the fans for their incredible generosity but admitted his ambitions may have been too lofty in crowdfunding the project.
However, he promised that the show would go on, albeit with new investors and with a slight delay.
“In the interim, LA Fights will be removed from the crowdfunding platform, and the project budgeted with an eye toward discussions with a number of private investors and agencies. While it may take longer for LA Fights to come to fruition, it is imperative that the product is undertaken properly and with the total commitment of all concerned parties. You have my assurance that the LA Fights you see will reflect the product I’ve envisioned. That result unquestionably outweighs a slight delay.”
Fans waited with bated breath after that announcement on February 2nd, the day his Kickstarter ended. McGuinness gave another update a week later, titled “I haven’t forgotten about you…” before going radio silent about the project.
His final update came in April that year, although as we did not back the Kickstarter we cannot see what was written. However, that was the last anybody heard of the project and nothing ever came out of LA Fights.
It seems likely that the financial backers never materialised and the project was put on an indefinite hiatus after April 2015. As of 2024, Nigel McGuinness has not released any material related to LA Fights, indicating that the concept is dead and buried.
Why Did LA Fights Fail As A Concept?
According to Kickstarter’s rules, if the full amount isn’t raised then no money is taken from the donors. This meant that at least nobody actually lost money on the promotion, unlike the litany of times 1PW screwed its fans over on pie-in-the-sky ideas that never came to fruition.
$370,000 was a huge amount to raise and was realistically never going to be met. Guinness was a well-known wrestler in TNA and ROH circles, but that was a niche within a niche. He only had a small subset of, admittedly dedicated, fans to try and back him on the project which was always going to be a struggle. This was nearly eight times what he received for The Last of McGuinness.
Another reason why fans may have been hesitant to back him was what he showed of the project – nothing. While he talked a big game about “changing wrestling” and “like Breaking Bad meets The Office meets UFC”, nothing tangible ever came from the campaign.
No concept art of what matches could look like. No characters, storylines or plots were ever revealed. The only thing shown was a poorly-made trailer, showing generic wrestling matches interspersed with helicopter shots of Los Angeles.
Even nearly a decade later not a hint of a script from the six-part series has made the light of day. Nigel McGuinness says he spent 18 months writing the project but we haven’t seen any of it.
In a Reddit AMA he admitted he considered shooting a pilot but never went through with it. That could have gone a long way to convincing fans to part way with their cash to get the project off the ground. In that same comment, he admitted, “perhaps haven’t done a good enough job of showing exactly what it is”.
He also added that it would be shot “mockumentary style” which again would have been useful to know before and in a much more accessible way than a comment in a Reddit thread.
Another misstep was in how the project was described. It just didn’t sound like something wrestling fans would latch onto, nor something your average television watcher wanted to see. The faux-MMA style doesn’t appeal to fans of legitimate combat sports while wrestling fans know it’s fake so don’t want to see fake-real-pretend-fighting. It’s a hat on a hat and nobody is here for it.
The LA Fights Kickstarter failure was a real shame. You could tell Nigel McGuinness was very passionate about the project and wanted to change the business in a positive manner. A pro wrestling drama could have been an exciting TV project but sadly it wasn’t as realized as he thought it was once the Kickstarter was created.
There hasn’t been any mention of the project since 2015. Nigel McGuinness failed to get private backing for LA Fights and it has been put on hold indefinitely. There may be a chance for it to get made in kind if he can get Tony Khan to use some of his concepts as part of some AEW angles.
However, LA Fights was just another dream unrealised for Nigel McGuinness.
