Warner Brothers Discovery Wants More AEW Content

By Liam Crowley

All Elite Wrestling is in the midst of crunch time. The young promotion's television deal with Warner Brothers Discovery is not up until the end of 2023, but AEW is seeking a renewal this fall. This renewal goes beyond just extending its stay with TNT and TBS too, as AEW is hoping for a more lucrative contract. That said, there has been growing concern over the likeliness of that happening since Warner Brothers merged with Discovery earlier this year, as the entertainment giant has been making sizable budget cuts across all of its divisions. It began with the scrapping of the fully-shot Batgirl movie and has continued with rumblings of mass layoffs across the company.

Even if recent signs seemed dire for AEW's TV future, it appears that WBD is very much behind their professional wrestling product. Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, Warner Bros. Discovery US Networks Group Chair and Chief Content Officer Kathleen Finch noted that with sports and scripted content being at the forefront of the company's biggest revenue drivers, AEW is very much the perfect amalgamation of those two mediums.

"We really play in the sports space. One of the things that we're doing around sports is creating shoulder programming to hold onto those fans," Finch said. "AEW pulls huge numbers, so we are working with the wrestling team to figure out what new kind of content can we build that's not in a wrestling ring."

That outside the ring content has been explored with AEW before. The company ran Rhodes to the Top, a reality series centered around former AEW stars Cody and Brandi Rhodes when they were still on the All Elite roster. Beyond that, Cody was featured as a judge on the Go-Big Show before being replaced after exiting AEW.

AEW President Tony Khan is aware of the massive opportunities that lie within their partnership with WBD, and has used that to AEW's advantage before. The promotion has run multiple WBD-branded episodes of AEW Dynamite, such as the Game of Thrones-inspired Winter is Coming annual television special as well as matches inspired by House of the Dragon, Space Jam, and Shark Week.

"Our TV deals are, I think, the biggest individual revenue driver and for us, we've got this great partnership with Warner Bros. Discovery and we've got the rest of this year and next year," Khan said in a previous interview. "They have really been so good to us and I feel like not only was the original leadership so great to take a chance on an unknown company, but then post-merger, the Discovery leadership that's come in has been so supportive and we're getting opportunities now with the new management even bigger than we've ever gotten before."

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