Since its inception in 2019, All Elite Wrestling has put an emphasis on its weekly television. The promotion constantly creates and builds to televised specials, from stacked AEW Dynamite cards like Grand Slam and Winter is Coming, to its quarterly Battle of the Belts events. That’s not to say that AEW doesn’t prioritize its pay-per-views, as the four signature shows regularly impress with both fan reception and buy rates. While the past year of AEW PPVs have delivered plenty of immortal moments, from Adam Cole and Bryan Danielson’s AEW All Out debuts to CM Punk and MJF’s instant classic AEW Revolution dog collar match, they have often been criticized for their runtimes.
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AEW’s most recent solo show, AEW Double or Nothing, featured 12 total matches and clocked in at four hours and 38 minutes. A solution to this supposed problem recently made waves, when AEW wrestler Dustin Rhodes revealed he “heard down the pike” that AEW would begin running two-day pay-per-views.
“I think we’re going to go to two-day events now, for pay-per-views. I believe. I’ve heard that down the pike,” Rhodes said. “It’ll be like a WrestleMania experience, you have two days of Double or Nothing or two-days of All Out or Revolution.”
Less than 24 hours after The Natural’s comments, AEW President Tony Khan appeared on Busted Open Radio to shut down all speculation.
“I saw a quote about it yesterday [Tuesday], a lot of times in wrestling media, I see stuff get reported by media that would not fly in other sports, unconfirmed and unsubstantiated rumors, but they spread like wildfire on Twitter,” Khan said (h/t Fightful). “That’s bad enough, but I actually saw one from inside the company that I was kind of surprised by because it’s not something we’ve ever really said or business planned or anything. I saw a report that we were talking about doing two-day pay-per-views, and I was like, ‘Who said that?’ I looked and it was Dustin! I was like, ‘Why would Dustin say that?’ I love Dustin so much and I was surprised that he said it because it’s not something we seriously internally discussed.”
Khan continued by admitting he watches how other promotions run their events, but certified that his shows will remain one-day for the foreseeable future.
“At most, at times, I like looking at other business models, at most I’ve said, ‘That’s an interesting business model,’ but far from saying, ‘That’s how I’m taking our stuff’ or, ‘That’s what I’m going to do.’ I’m definitely not doing that.” Khan stated. “Even if I was, and I’m not, I probably wouldn’t want somebody to break that news at a panel. I can honestly say, that’s not what we’re doing anyway. I was surprised by that. For the long-term, foreseeable future, I still see the pay-per-views being the great one-day events we’ve been doing. A lot of people were like, ‘How is that going to work, what is that about?’ Well, it’s not going to work, it’s not about anything. It’s not true.”
AEW Dynamite: Quake by the Lake airs tonight at 8 PM ET on TBS.
