Tony Khan says he wants to see wrestlers wrestle on television, not sit in a studio.
During an interview with Gavin Bridge at Monaco Streaming Film Festival, Tony Khan spoke about the WWE Backstage show on FOX Sports and how it didn’t gel with him as a long-term series. Khan said he received a prior pitch to do a similar show for AEW, but explained why he had reservations in doing so.
“I didn’t agree with [WWE] Backstage at all. I didn’t think that was a good format. I actually had been pitched to do a format like that for AEW and I refused because I don’t think wrestling fans wanted to see that format. I think wrestling fans when they tune in to watch the wrestling show, they want to watch the wrestling and Backstage to me should be a lower-budget streaming type show. I don’t know if it had the legs to carry as a TV show, even though the people involved with it were awesome and a lot of them work for me now, and they’re huge stars.
“But like I want to watch CM Punk wrestle. I want to watch Christian Cage wrestle. And to me, that is the bread and butter. And I think it’s like I love watching those guys talk about wrestling don’t get me wrong, I think that would be a kickass streaming show. I don’t know if I would build one of my TV franchises around guys talking about wrestling. At least not in the context of analyzing it or breaking it down.”
“[The pitch] was literally for Rampage, it was like part of the format I turned down [and] wouldn’t do, like honestly. They asked about, ‘would you do this as part of the third hour’ and I said no. It’s gonna be wrestling and I have a different format for it.”
Tony Khan also shared how AEW’s metrics have seen a boost, explaining that the promotion’s SVOD (subscription video on demand) totals have seen a boost since CM Punk came on board in August.
“We’ve seen a lift in our pay-per-numbers year over year. We have four quarterly events and each one of them has been up from the year prior so our Q2 and Q3 events, Double or Nothing and All Out, now we’ve presented three of those and each of them has gone up year over year significantly. And the biggest lift yet was the one we got from the most recent All Out,” Khan said, noting that it was the most non-WWE PPV buys since the 1990s.
“Our SVOD subscriptions on FITE has more than doubled in just a couple months since CM Punk signed up which is amazing because those subscriptions had been accumulating for almost two years before that,” he added.
On the most recent episode of 83 Weeks, Eric Bischoff replied to Tony Khan’s comments after his initial ‘shut up and wrestle’ remarks. Bischoff said he took issue with Khan’s comments about Ted Turner, among other issues, and explained why he finally spoke out about the “competition” talk. Read Bischoff’s reply at this link.
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