AEW President Tony Khan chats the upcoming head-to-head between SmackDown and Rampage.
Beginning at 9 PM EST on Friday, AEW and WWE’s programming will be going head-to-head. WWE added a 30-minute overrun to SmackDown that will continue past 10 PM EST when Rampage starts. Tony Khan responded by announcing a BUY-IN pre-show at 9 PM which will feature Bryan Danielson versus Minoru Suzuki.
Khan is making the media rounds to promote Rampage and Dynamite in Miami, Florida this week and he spoke to the New York Post. An ad aired on October 10th for SmackDown which promoted the last 30 minutes of the show as commercial-free. While on that topic, Khan said he can go that route as well because he has more money.
It’s a little bit different than the Wednesday Night Wars because that was from the very beginning of Dynamite and we put our head down and it was an every-week thing. This seemed like pretty predatory, which is fine if that’s how you want to play it. It’s not outwardly how they’ve (WWE) shown they wanted to play it.
I’ve coined a phrase which is WYW, watch your wrestling. Whatever people [want] to watch, I want them to watch it. Unfortunately, if we are on at the same time it’s harder for people to watch their wrestling, at least live. We can take the commercials out of it. If you want to take the commercials out of it, I can do that too. It doesn’t seem very civil but I have more money than they do so I can afford to do that longer than they can. But that’s how we make money at the end of the day, so I was surprised when they took those out.
This is the ad where it lists the final 30 mins as commercial-free.
I did reach out to Fox and WWE and neither side has confirmed this yet, nor was it part of the SmackDown ads that ran on Raw or NXT this week. https://t.co/4KOWfgUImc
— John Pollock (@iamjohnpollock) October 13, 2021
He was asked about the introduction of the TBS Championship. Tony says it’ll be presented in a similar manner to the TNT Title once it’s established.
I think it will be very similar once it gets established. We’ll have a tournament. We had a great tournament for the TNT title. I think we’ll have a great TBS title tournament with a field that is just as strong, which really shows how far the development of our women’s division has come since we launched Dynamite two years ago because we have built a number of new stars and a lot of the women in the division have improved a ton and we signed some new stars as well.
CM Punk recently gave his thoughts about AEW adding titles and to read POST Wrestling’s write-up about Punk’s comments, click here.
