Foreword
Images of men wrestling are as arresting and compelling as any other the art world has produced. From the friezes and freestanding statues the Greeks created in honor of a sport even their gods enjoyed to the frolic of bored farmhands in Andy Warhol’s avant-garde film Lonesome Cowboys, we have ample evidence that wrestling resonates deeply in human consciousness across millennia and cultures. Even the clowning of TV wrestling has not succeeded in erasing its mystique.
Movimus cameras have beautifully depicted male bodies grappling to submission for five years, beginning with an emotionally charged contest between Jeff Jordan and Travis Carter in the autumn of 2012. Since then, the company has pulled in wrestlers from across the United States and other nations. Its cameras close in tightly on the action, capturing the sport’s texture and drama with such a bracing intensity that even casual viewers share in the athletes’ willpower, sporadic flashes of panic, and exhilarating victory. The body types, ethnicities, and levels of competence are diverse, yet the ritual formality of wrestling unifies them, giving these images a nobility that stirs both body and mind.
2012
Movimus Wrestling started as an idea back in late summer 2012. The idea was to bring back the rich archive of its predecessor and build on top of it. We have identified our niche in this tightly competitive space, and we want to continue this authentic no-holds-barred style of submission wrestling because there is an audience for it.
Finally, on the eve of Thanksgiving, 2012, we quietly launched MovimusWrestling.com. The following morning, November 22, our email blast went out. And the rest, is history.
One of the questions that we asked from time to time is what is "Movimus" Wrestling?
Movimus is derived from Latin, moveo, which means to move, stir or set in motion. and that is what we do.
Movimus Wrestling started with a legacy. From there, we continue building on top of the history and into future. We admit that there were a lot of fumbling and screwups on our part initially. We were not sure how we were going to pull it off. However, with the support and dedication from our customers and fans, we are able to figure out solutions and be here to celebrate half a decade in business.
While 5 years is not long for any company to be around, given our history, we believe it is quite an achievement and we want to acknowledge you, our customers, fans and supporters for making it possible.
THANK YOU!
2013
In 2013, we started ramping up our production and filmed 17 matches. In that year, we introduced new wrestlers including Asa Cruz, Don Cooper, Derek Ortiz, Eli Thompson, Claymore K. Alexander and Jimmy Reilly.
Familiar faces also returned to Movimus Wrestling, including Brock Hammer, Jolt Jenkins, Chuck Rowen, Max Anderson, amongst many others.
We knew that 17 matches a year was not going to satisfy our fans and so a goal was made to increase the number of releases for the following year.
2014
2014 saw Movimus Wrestling releasing 31 new matches made possible through the support of fans who funded our Indiegogo campaign. The campaign helped us kickstart some of the initiatives we were looking to improve on and allowed us to take our website to the next level.
State-of-the-art technology provides more dramatic, more deeply saturated colors than anything you're likely to find on any other wrestling site. The video has a more cinematic, soft-focus look. Its dark and dreamy ambience aside, the sometimes frenetic camerawork captures every twitch and twist from nearly the perfect angle, thrusting us viewers into the thick of it.
In November 2014, after months of preparation in the background, Movimus Wrestling migrated to a new e-commerce platform that provides for the first time ever, in our 2 year history, shopping carts! Previously, with our website, customers are limited to downloading one match at a time. With the new platform, because of a shopping cart, customers are able to add as many matches as they want, and download all at once. This simple tool really made a difference to our customers and they were quick to embrace it.
2015
After a pretty amazing 2014, in early 2015 we hit a bump. PayPal decided that we had violated their Acceptable Use Policy and disabled our account. Since we launched Movimus Wrestling, we have used PayPal as our default payment processor and, for a few days, we were not able to operate the site. Thankfully, we were able to resolve the situation quickly, but it got us thinking into planning ahead.
We made several appeals to PayPal but somehow always ended up with their automated response and we were not able to get in touch with anyone on their end to work through a solution on how we violated the AUP. By April, we knew we needed a new solution and started testing a few possible solutions.
We were also recognised in the beginning of the year by the now defunct blog, LaSustanciaP, for several achievements. They included:
On June 26, 2015, we announced the download availability of our very match to be released simultaneously in HD and 4K. Subsequently, we made the back titles of the matches we had filmed in that format available for downloads as well in the new resolution, making Movimus Wrestling the very submission wrestling company to do so.
2015, Movimus Wrestling released 33 original matches, 2 more than the previous year. 11 new wrestlers joined our ranks with a number becoming immediate fan favorites. This new class of wrestlers brought new life into Movimus Wrestling, each with their unique backgrounds and making Movimus Wrestling one of the most diverse in this niche of submission wrestling.
Just as we thought we settled our issues with PayPal, another bump hit us in late June, when YouTube, without warning, deactivated our account, with a similar situation. We had made all our previews available on YouTube for years with no problems and to be suddenly told we are in violation of their service agreement came as a surprise. Despite several attempts on our end to reach out to them, we consistently got an automated response. In the end, we decided to migrate to a different streaming service provider to just keep the matches going.
Customer gear maker, Muscleskins, kindly provided our wrestlers with their custom built gearing we started featuring some of our wrestlers in them. Each item was customized for our wrestlers and we were pretty impressed by how they turned out.
2016
In 2016, our focus was to make our website more mobile friendly. We started noticing the shift of visitors coming to MovimusWrestling.com via their mobile devices, with iOS being the popular platform since late 2014. We explored several options that would make mobile downloads easier for our mobile customers, but there were technical and other logistical challenges that we had to face to make it happen. The main challenge we had was to get our matches distributed via some of the largest video download services.
However, since we are viewed as a niche, we were unable to get the distribution we wanted and we had to work with existing technology solutions to create a way for mobile downloads. Thankfully, there were some ready solutions to the problem, and we were able to integrate them into MovimusWrestling.com easily.
Las Vegas
We are fortunate to have so many new wrestlers eager to join our team this year. What's more, we are proud to say that we have a very diverse range of wrestlers, from ethnicities, to body shapes, age, height etc. We believe that the diversity keeps us interesting and demonstrated the fact that never judge a book by its cover.