AEW TV debuts on TNT this Fall

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Via The Wrap

The All Elite Wrestling (AEW)-Turner deal is now “virtually done,” a person with knowledge of the plan tells TheWrap exclusively. Current plans call for the partnership to be announced through select press one hour before WarnerMedia’s Wednesday upfront event, the individual said. The arrangement made between the parties called for a small group of reporters to be informed of the agreement on an embargoed basis the evening before.

AEW president Tony Khan and some of his wrestlers are expected to be in attendance at the Madison Square Garden — the mecca of professional wrestling — pitch to media buyers, the person told us. The presentation begins at 10 a.m. New York City time.

Current plans call for Turner to begin airing a weekly AEW wrestling show this fall on TNT.

Financial terms of the deal are not expected to be disclosed as AEW is not a publicly traded company. The leader in the space, WWE, is.

When reached, a spokeswoman for Turner declined to comment on this story. A rep for AEW has not responded to TheWrap’s request for comment.

Last month, TheWrap reported that All Elite Wrestling and Turner were in advanced talks for a TV deal. At the time, negotiations made it unclear whether or not an agreement would be in place by next week’s upfront, which is when television networks debut their new fall shows for advertisers.

The first person to report AEW’s planned affiliation with the WarnerMedia upfront was a Twitter user who goes by FrontRowBrian:

Since then, complex negotiations put hopes for the upfront in jeopardy, our individual with knowledge of the talks had told us. We now know the details of the public rollout plan, which was finalized on Wednesday.

WarnerMedia has since provided media with tip sheets listing the talent planned for its upfront “blue carpet,” but AEW was not represented on those versions.

Turner, a WarnerMedia property, is now owned by AT&T. AEW is backed financially by Jacksonville Jaguars owner Shahid Khan, Tony Khan’s father.

Though AEW has still only had one big show to date, its growing roster is impressive. Founded by wrestlers Cody and tag-team The Young Bucks (Matt and Nick Jackson), the company has signed Chris Jericho, Pac (formerly Neville in WWE) and Kenny Omega to wrestle, among others, as well as WWE legend Jim Ross on commentary.

AEW’s next big event is May 25’s “Double or Nothing” in Las Vegas. The show will be available as a pay-per-view purchase in the UK via ITV Box Office. We are awaiting the announcement of a stateside platform for the event. Previously, our sourcing indicated that “Double or Nothing” would not be a part of the Turner deal.

TNT’s primary competitor, USA Network, currently airs WWE’s “Raw” on Mondays and “SmackDown Live” on Tuesdays. However, “SmackDown” is heading to Fox’s broadcast network this fall, when it will switch to Fridays.

This is fucking huge.

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Wednesday is going to be very interesting.

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From this week's Observer Newlsetter.

All Elite Wrestling and WarnerMedia announced officially at the latters’ upfronts at the Hulu Theater a deal for weekly prime time wrestling on TNT.

This would be the most significant television breakthrough for pro wrestling in the U.S. since Turner Broadcasting canceled wrestling on TNT and TBS in early 2001.

The deal, which was expected, came without much in the way of answers to a lot of the questions, largely because those questions haven’t been answered.

Right now nothing is concrete past the point of a weekly two-hour live show. The day of the week is not official, although it will likely be either Tuesday or Wednesday night.

WarnerMedia is going to make the call based on market research to determine the value of going on Tuesday, with it being a “creature of habit” night for wrestling fans right now, with the idea of going 8-10 p.m. is the current Smackdown time slot. The downside of that move is TNT has NBA commitments on Tuesday. If it does go on Tuesday, it would likely mean, like was the case with wrestling in the WCW era, that during the NBA season it would likely be cut down. It would air, perhaps on one hour form some weeks, and probably just prior to the NBA game of the night.

On Wednesday, it is not as much a current destination of habit for two million wrestling fans, but there would be fewer time slot changes and they would almost every week be able to run the full two hours.

No start date was announced although the belief is it will be at the start of the fall season in October. The last Tuesday Smackdown on USA will be 9/24, meaning if Tuesday is the night, 10/1 would be the perfect start date. If it’s Wednesday, while 10/2 wouldn’t be as necessary, one would still think the start date would be in that range.

The show’s name hasn’t been decided on. It’s not clear when the decision will be made. AEW is currently negotiating television deals in the U.K., obviously with ITV 4, and in Canada, but the deals can’t be finalized until the day of the week is decided. Australia and Mexico are targets as well, but the U.S., U.K. and Canada are expected to be the key markets when the show launches.

The deal also includes content on B/R Live, including PPV shows. The PPV content will be done more like UFC, where it will be a full price PPV at $49.95, and not undercutting the PPV providers’ price. That may have been something that they had little choice on, because in cutting recent deals with inDemand, Dish and DirecTV, the contract stipulations likely called for an inability to undercut the price on streaming. WWE was able to do that by basically just doing it, and the PPV providers had to either agree to continue airing the shows or not. But WWE had leverage due to its long history which AEW wouldn’t have had.

The price tag brought a lot of complaints, given wrestling fans are used to the WWE streaming at $9.99 per month and New Japan at even less for multiple shows. It’s still less than UFC or boxing PPVs, although boxing PPVs are lessening due to DAZN.

AEW to TNT had been talked about by AEW President Tony Khan and Kevin Reilly, the President of TNT and TBS, for nearly one year, even predating All In. But the first actual serious negotiations started in mid-November. Khan had promised a strong roster in those negotiations and was able to sign every key person he had promised. Khan negotiated the deal along with Bernie Cahill, the co-founder of Activist Artists Management, LLC, which Khan is a partner in.

There were also negotiations with Showtime, although TNT was always the favorite to end up as the destination point. Showtime would have likely been a deal for major shows, perhaps longer than two hours, like in the Strikeforce days, but not weekly.

The terms of the deal were said to be very complicated. Unlike with ITV, which is having its sports side handle the wrestling, as opposed to the entertainment side that handled World of Sport, this deal encompasses both the sports and entertainment sides of the WarnerMedia empire.

There are some similarities here to Vince McMahon’s XFL deal, in the sense there is no direct rights fees, although there are financial guarantees in the deal and the financial value of the deal is incredible for a start-up company.

The key is that WarnerMedia will be paying for production, the value of which is unknown. But that shocked most in the wrestling industry because in the modern era very few wrestling deals actually paid for production. In a sense, WCW, since they were owned by Turner Broadcasting, had production and other costs paid for just like Paramount does for Bellator. But in non-ownership deals, only in markets where wrestling on a local basis had a history of gigantic ratings did the television station pay for production, and those budgets were infinitesimal compared to the budget here. WWE still pays for its production, which is key because the person who pays for production controls the final product of what is produced. Both WWE and UFC have for years wanted full control of the production.

There is also an ad revenue split with a downside guarantee. So the final value of the deal will be directly related to ad rates and attractiveness of the product, as well as in the long run, the ratings. This behooves AEW to do an advertiser friendly show. There has been talk from the start of a very sports-centric product, with similarities to UFC and Mid South Wrestling in different ways, with analytics used in storylines, from won-loss records to other detailed statistics and likely rankings and such. How this will all transpire is still unknown and there is a question of being able to make it work, since nothing has ever been done like this in the past.

The one thing that is for certain is that there will be no scripting of promos and no teleprompter usage for promos. The idea is to avoid the robotic delivered reading or memorizing of lines that many have complained has taken the soul out of wrestling and created a period where the in-ring work in WWE has never been better but the promos have never been worse.

The belief within the company is this deal will allow them to be profitable by 2020.

But there are still very obvious challenges, such as being able to draw prime time ratings on a station like TNT. TNT averaged 1,171,000 viewers in prime time in 2018, putting it in seventh place on cable, behind Fox News, ESPN, MSNBC, HGTV, USA and TBS.

From the Turner side, because of the ability of wrestling to be a product on multi-platforms, with television as the main driver but not the only driver, that it doesn’t have to do the network average to be a big success. But the number is always important. Previously, because the role of wrestling was largely to bring up the network average, since wrestling performed poorly when it came to selling ads, a wrestling show was of no value if it didn’t beat the network average.

TNT is available in slightly more homes, just under 90 million, than USA, which is in just under 89 million homes. USA only beats TNT in ratings due to Raw and Smackdown.

In comparison to the XFL deal, the similarity in both cases is that the stations are paying for the television production. The XFL deal is superior due to airing many games on network television. The AEW deal is superior due to sharing in advertising revenue and having guaranteed revenue built into the deal, and also being in prime time on a weeknight as opposed to mostly weekend afternoons.

Right now it is not clear whether the show would air live on the West Coast, like a sports property would, or three hours later in prime time on the West Coast, like WWE has always done. In the Nitro era, TNT actually ran two different airings nationally, a live feed and a replay that would air in prime time on the West Coast. At that time, TNT and TBS didn’t have West Coast feeds, although at the end of the run they had followed the major cable stations in doing so.

It also will be interesting to see how and if WWE will counter. It’s doubtful they would add a new main brand show, but they could do a second NXT show, or move the NXT Wednesday show to FS 1. But that move could backfire, as unless NXT is two hours, it would give AEW an unopposed hour. Also, with TNT beating a stronger station than FS 1, that counter programming could give AEW a strong market edge if they were to score better ratings than a WWE property head-to-head because that’s the exact scenario that would make them immediately be established as a player. Of course, if NXT were to draw better ratings on a weaker station, that would work in WWE’s favor.

AEW brought Khan, The Young Bucks, Kenny Omega, Britt Baker, Brandi Rhodes, Cody, Adam Page and Dana Massie to the upfronts. The decision was made not to bring Chris Jericho because Khan wants to present more of an old school feel and not have his main event of Jericho vs. Omega both there, unless it was to shoot an angle, and clearly, that was not the time or the place to shoot such an angle. Most of those names would be expected, but Baker was an interesting choice. Clearly she is going to be presented as one of the stars of the company and faces of the women’s division, because she comes across well in the media with the idea of a full-time dentist who has a practice and also wrestles.

It will also be interesting to see how the leading advertisers, many of which were present at the upfronts, take to the idea of wrestling on TNT and the very different group of wrestlers who were there.

There will also be likely other programming on B/R.

“Wrestling fans have wanted—and needed–something different, authentic and better for far too long,” said Khan. “AEW is answering the call. AEW is about more than wrestling. It’s about a movement fueled by wrestling fans who have been underserved and perhaps even disappointed by what the industry has produced in recent years. AEW is rising to the occasion with Double or Nothing and today taking it a step further by partnering with WarnerMedia, which is as committed as we are to making wrestling fans the one and only priority. With WarnerMedia, AEW is poised globally to redefine wrestling as we know it today.”

“One thing we really strongly want to present is wins and losses mattering again in pro wrestling,” said Cody to Variety. “That takes more than the W and the L column,” he said. “We’re talking about percentage of times someone loses to this particular maneuver, percentages against somebody of this height, a whole by-the-numbers approach that really intrigues me. It’s not a cornerstone of AEW necessarily but it’s a great peripheral element we’re working on and that’s going to be exclusive to us.”

There will also likely be additional programming on B/R Live, although nothing has been worked out as to what that would be. The company wants a major push to B/R Live. One source at Turner noted that the ratings on TNT will matter but they are trying to leverage multiple venues, including B/R Live, and YouTube, with their main brands like Rick & Morty, Jokers and Conan, and AEW could fit into that.

For the 5/25 PPV show, it will air on inDemand, Dish and DirecTV in the U.S. and on some Canadian cable systems but not all. ITV will have it on their PPV system in the U.K. ITV also would own streaming rights in the U.K. B/R Live would also stream the show in the U.S., and Canada. Fite TV is to stream the show all over the world except in the U.S. and U.K., including in Canada.

The one hour Buy In pre-game show will air on all social media channels including YouTube, Facebook and twitter in North America, and on ITV 4 in the U.K. ITV 4 will also be airing a one hour special called “Before the Bell,” on 5/24 at 12:05 a.m. (Just after midnight Thursday night).

In the U.S., the show will start at 7 p.m. Eastern with Buy In, and the PPV is scheduled from 8 p.m. to midnight.

Buy In will feature Kip Sabian vs. Sammy Guevara and the 21 man Casino Battle Royale match for a later championship match. Names listed thus far for that match are Sonny Kiss, Brandon Cutler, Ace Romero, Glacier, Brian Pillman Jr., Sunny Daze, MJF, Joey Janela, Dustin Thomas, Billy Gunn, Jimmy Havoc, Jungle Boy and Michael Nakazawa.

The main card is now completed with Omega vs. Jericho, Young Bucks vs. Pentagon Jr. & Fenix for the AAA tag titles, Page vs. Pac, Cody vs. Dustin Rhodes, Christopher Daniels & Frankie Kazarian & Scorpio Sky vs. Cima & T-Hawk & Lindaman, Dr. Britt Baker vs. Nyla Rose vs. Kylie Rae and two matches announced this week, Chuck Taylor & Trent Baretta vs. Jack Evans & Angelico and Aja Kong & Yuka Sakazaki & Emi Sakura vs. Hikaru Shida & Riho & Ryo Mizunami. The latter match is one put together by Kenny Omega to showcase Japanese women’s wrestling. One of the AEW battle plans is that use Japanese women like WCW used the Mexican wrestlers and cruiserweights, as a style unique to them. Kong, who is 48, is a Hall of Famer and one of the biggest stars of the early 90s All Japan Women hot period. Sakura, 42, is a 24-year-veteran and also a notable trainer and has held titles in numerous Japanese groups. Shida, 30, was an actress who became a pro wrestler after playing one in a movie and loving learning it.

The event is sold out, but there are still 1,200 tickets left on the secondary market. The lowest price in is now $50.