Throughout his appearance on this week’s The Steve Austin Show, AEW president Tony Khan gave bits of information about the company’s strategy once the television show with TNT starts this fall.
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Khan confirmed that the show will be two hours long and live every week, and that the show will tour across the country (and overseas at some point in the future) every week rather than operate in a studio like TNA (Impact) Wrestling. He also added that while there will still be house shows (non-televised live events), there won’t be nearly as many as WWE’s touring schedule. As a result, the weekly schedule for AEW wrestlers will be much less grueling.
“It’s not my core business focus,” Khan said. “And I’ve kind of made it part of the business plan is that I don’t want to put too much mileage on the top performers by having them perform on shows where it’s not going to generate as much revenue, where it doesn’t make as much business sense to put the mileage on your guys. And I also don’t want to put out an inferior house show product that isn’t the top people.
“If you do see us do house shows, they are going to be top shows with the top people, which means we’re not going to be doing five or six a week of them,” Khan said. “So when we get into weekly TV, I’d like to get into a good rhythm of where we’re doing, let’s say, between 100-120 shows a year, it’s pretty busy but it doesn’t mean every performer is going to be on every show. It means you’re going to get a combination of our top performers every night.”
Khan then brought up the idea of an offseason, an idea that some wrestlers have proposed in the past. He said AEW would not have one as many wrestling fans won’t wrestling every week regardless of what time of the year it is.
“Rather than have an offseason, I believe we can extend the lives of the performers by not doing too many events, which is why I’ll never have people on the road five, six nights a week ever,” Khan said. “It just doesn’t make sense.”
He also added that he plans on letting the wrestlers work other events, even independent wrestling shows, if they’re important to that wrestler and it doesn’t conflict with the lighter AEW schedule.
AEW’s next event, Fyter Fest, takes place on June 29 in Daytona Beach, Florida.
