Cody Rhodes Confirms AEW Looking At Stadiums For Future Event

Despite not yet holding a live event, All Elite Wrestling has already proved to be full of drawing power and earnings potential.

The brand's first event, Double or Nothing, will take place on May 25th at the Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas, Nevada. The tickets for that event sold out in mere minutes over the course of two days (a pre-sale and a general on-sale), with close to 15,000 tickets snatched up by fans (and scalpers).

The question now is should the promotion start looking at even bigger venues for some of their future shows after the promotion really gets going? Cody Rhodes confirmed during a recent interview with Wrestling Inc. that the company is keeping their options open when it comes to possibly looking at stadiums.

"To be frank, I have a couple site visits in the next few weeks that are stadiums," Rhodes confirmed. "So, it doesn't mean anything. There's no promises, no contracts, no nothing like that. Just me and my business partners checking out a few spots. That would be really exciting [to host that many people]. I mean, that would be a dream come true to have over 40,000+. When you get between that 40 and 80 range a WrestleMania-like event has, that Super Bowl event-like has…that's something special. But I know that we don't want to — we really got to do this right. We got to crawl before we walk and we've got to walk before we run, and you've seen companies that have a lot of financial backing take shop that they shouldn't take, so, we're just trying to be careful."

Should the promotion continue to have sustained ticket demand once they began holding more events, stadiums could definitely be a viable option. Right now, the brand's second show is set to occur in July in Jacksonville, Florida, and there's nothing else set on the calendar.

Undoubtedly, one of the reasons for the quick sell-outs (Double or Nothing, All In last fall) is fans traveling in from all around the country due to the "destination event" feel of the shows and the fact that they are a rarity. However, once events starting happening with more regularity and at a faster clip, it won't be feasible for so many fans to continue to travel to the events and they will have to rely on ticket buyers from a much smaller traveling radius.

That's not to say that the brand isn't capable of having a big stadium show at some point during the year, but as Rhodes said, the promotion needs to "crawl" first. After all, there's a big difference between selling 15,000 tickets very quickly and selling over 40,000 tickets.

[H/T to Wrestling Inc. for the transcript.]