So I don’t know whether you’ve heard, but there’s a fight going on between Impact Wrestling and Jeff and Matt Hardy over who owns the rights to Matt’s “Broken Brilliance/Broken Universe” characters. I understand if you somehow missed that. It’s been pretty hush-hush, and it’s not like Impact’s president has been releasing portions of confidential contracts or anything. Crap, wait. All of that was supposed to be in the sarcasm font. Dangit. We’ll fix it in post.
Anyway, from all accounts, both Matt Hardy and his current employer want to bring the Broken characters to WWE, but they have to get through all this legal pyro and ballyhoo before that can happen. Reby Hardy has been pretty outspoken about the fact that the Hardys conceived and filmed the whole thing with minimal involvement from Impact (and that performers like “Señor Benjamin” and King Maxel never signed contracts or releases or anything).
Now Jeff Hardy is claiming not only did Impact have nothing to do with the creation of these intellectual properties, but the Hardys also funded the majority of those segments themselves. He explained as much on a recent episode of Talk is Jericho. (Transcript via Wrestling Inc.)
“Oh yeah [the Hardys did the Broken stuff on their own]. Oh yeah [the Hardys financed it themselves], for sure, yeah. Yeah, basically [the Hardys would simply deliver the finished product to Impact Wrestling]. Yeah, everything except the last thing we did, which was Total Nonstop Deletion and it was Apocalypto. I was like, ‘man, what if we did a volcano?’ Back in my first run here I had a little volcano in my yard and I jumped it with my dirt bike and all that madness and so I thought, ‘maybe I can build another volcano,’ but you can’t get clay around Cameron [North Carolina], man. Like Lumberton [North Carolina] was the closest place, but, luckily, a friend of mine had a place. He dug stuff out and threw stuff in, like, from landscaping or whatever, and so I spent $3,000 building a damn clay volcano, just to, like, dig a hole in it. And, actually, they brought pyro in there, got my stuff out of it and made a big old flame out of it, so they put a lot of money into that one, that last thing we did, but other than that, it was all us and it was very low budget. But that’s what made Final Deletion so cool, because there was no budget. I want my first music video to be kind of like that.”
Granted, none of this will make any difference if a judge determines either that the Hardys’ Impact contracts are valid, and/or that the “Broken Matt Hardy” is distinct from the original “Matt Hardy” character that predates Matt’s employment with Impact. But it certainly helps their case in the court of public opinion, if nowhere else. That’s the most important court there is!
