Originally entitled Eye Scream Man before going through numerous name changes to make it sound less like a direct-to-DVD cheapo, See No Evil was penned by WWE creative writer Dan Madigan. Madigan was one of the first Hollywood screen writers WWE hired for its creative team in a bid to draft in what they saw as proper industry people. Reportedly, Madigan was famously driven out of WWE after a character pitch based on a thawed out Nazi storm trooper was deemed in too poor a taste even for McMahon. Any wrestling fans who remember the Katie Vick storyline, which also featured Kane, will realise just how bad this must have been.

See No Evil was a failure on almost every level for WWE. Although it made almost twice as much as the $8 million it cost, given that horror tends to do well at the box office, this must have been a disappointment. The film left horror fans cold too. Featuring a bunch of loathsome young offenders being carted off to a disused hotel to give it a clean up as part of reduced sentence incentive, they are picked off one at a time by a rampaging monster with an eye ball fetish.

Apart from a couple of inventive death scenes, See No Evil got a lot of things wrong, particularly with Kane. There was no mystery build up as to the reveal of Kane in the film, but that wasn’t the main problem. Kane had been on weekly TV for almost ten years, playing both a good and bad guy with such regularity that anyone who was familiar with him would find it very difficult to be scared of him. The fact that he looks like a slightly disgruntled jelly baby didn’t help, either.

In 2008, WWE decided to change the direction of its product. Having previously been classified as PG-14 television in the US, it made the move to a totally PG-rated product, which meant a ban on blood and its more risqué storylines. It also signalled a change in the type of movies it wanted to produce.

Rather than sticking to the action guns which brought it what little success it had enjoyed so far, the company moved toward serious dramas. WWE’s first effort was Legendary – but make no mistake, the film was anything but. Set in the world of high school wrestling, this was a soppy, coming-of-age tale that WWE thought could entice parents of its new, younger target audience into the cinema with their offspring thanks to the presence of their hero, John Cena. Marketing the feature as a serious drama on the back of casting Six Feet Under’s Patricia Clarkson and erm, Danny Glover, WWE found out the expensive way that Cena’s fans weren’t interested in seeing him outside of the ring. Though the film only had a one weekend release it only took just over $200,000.