During the Netflix documentary series, “Mr. McMahon,” Vince McMahon provided details about WWF’s name transformation to WWE in 2002, a consequence of the organization’s loss of a lawsuit to the World Wildlife Fund.
The decision to drop “Federation” from its moniker began being debated within WWE after the World Wildlife Fund (also referred to as the World Wide Fund for Nature) succeeded in a British court action.
The court ruling barred the World Wrestling Federation from utilizing its 1998-established logo and the acronym WWF under certain conditions. The Fund’s argument hinged on the potential confusion that could arise in the market due to the duplicated usage of the WWF abbreviation by the two vastly different entities.
The Fund further elaborated its position by expressing its disinterest in any association with the World Wrestling Federation.
Expressing his opinions on the case, McMahon stated, “When this lawsuit was filed, we tried to fight it, as we do most lawsuits. It looked like, ‘Wait. We’re not gonna win this thing.’ They had, in fact, used the initials WWF long before we did. So it changed from WWF to WWE because we were entertainment. It wasn’t necessarily a good thing that we had to change our name. I didn’t want to change, but you can’t do anything about it. Once something is closed, you have to move on. Whenever there is a failure, and there’ve been a lot of failures in my life, if you allow it to fester like, ‘I wish that would have worked. If I’d have done this, that would’ve worked.’ It’ll drive you nuts. Let it freaking go and think about something positive and work at something positive, not anything that’s negative.”
The “Mr. McMahon” documentary series, which consists of six hour-long episodes, explores multiple sexual misconduct allegations lodged against McMahon by various women over the span of his career.