Wrestling Thread 8: Follow The Buzzards • Page 399

not familiar with this site but says a source close to him says he is WWE bound


The bad news? “Potentially starting in NXT first”

no. stop

 

I'm sure with this deal done it will make things happen for AEW now.

 

If Okada goes to NXT...

 

That should be completely non-negotiable like Styles. Unless he’s specifically asking to go

 

No way he goes to NXT first.

 

Although if he wants to face Dragunov... *drools*

 

Zarian has been saying AEW on Max is imminent for like a year and a half now

Also, I don't think Okada would start in NXT. Not sure of the source as I don't follow puroresu much at all these days, but it just seems far fetched.

 

does andrew know what imminent means

 

I suspect that is this Saturdays show opposite the Rumble, which is always a bad slot

 

"(AEW attendance) is not good. One of the things is like, there were a lot of weak advances in the last quarter, but they had a lot of the shows where they got late buys, whether it was bringing in Okada or Mistico, or having an MJF or Kenny Omega match, or just good local promotion, or lowering ticket prices, things like that.

"And so, I kind of got lulled into this sense of, 'okay the advances suck, but it's not that bad'. And it really wasn't that bad the last quarter, Well, now, it's that bad. And it looks worse.

"Wednesday's show, they're under 2,000. To me, under 4,000 for Dynamite is where it gets to be below so-so. 4,000 to me is fine for AEW. Under 4,000 not so great. Under 3,000, pretty bad. Under 2,000 is really bad. Especially when you're coming to a city once a year.

"They've got Tulsa coming up, they've never been to Tulsa, they're under 2,000 there as well. And then the last week, St Louis on Saturday, when I saw that number… St Louis is a historically great wrestling city, it's not like they come there often, and to do under 3,000 on a Saturday night, it's really not good at all.

"Another problem that they have is that every time they go back to a market, in more cases than not, the attendance goes down. There's always exceptions to every rule, but in more cases than not they go down. And it's like, okay, when you're at 4,000 and you're going down, not so great. When you're at 2,800 and you're going down in a major city, where are you headed?

"You're getting now to WCW 2000. And people hate when I use that term, but they're getting there. And that's a scary place to be.

"There's a lot of things that they could do, but they haven't. I know that Kosha Irby's in, and this is actually his job, his job is going to be to get this stuff up. And it's way too early to put any blame on him, he just got there.

"Even if you're the greatest promoter in the world, people are gonna buy more or less based on the product and the excitement of the product. WCW had Zane Bressloff in 2000 and they couldn't sell tickets because nobody wanted to buy tickets to the product, and with AEW, the number of people who wanna buy tickets to the product is… they'll buy the pay-per-views, they'll watch Wednesday night TV, but they're not going in any great numbers to the shows."

 

WWE just drew their largest Tulsa crowd ever 3 months ago at over 10k (I think with Cena, to be fair) and AEW is *hoping* for 2k?


sheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeesh

 

I assume it’s a push to feed her to Jade; so yeah, the standard Big Show January push

Doesn’t Netflix have an ad supported tier. I could see it being like AEW on Fite, where some matches go on during commercial breaks, etc…and other times they just serve WWE and Netflix show commercials

 

Ratings and PPV buys are still strong though, no? Get a decent TV deal and they'll be ok.

 

Biggest benefit; Netflix doesn’t release viewing numbers, so ratings discussions hopefully die off

 

I mean, it looks like they are prioritizing ticket prices over pure attendance numbers until the last few days; and I think people have caught on.

That said, for a go-home double taping to a PPV and sting’s last guaranteed tv appearance, this is not good

 

I think most of the OKC tickets sold in the last week so I think it will end up being ok. That being said there were billboards for Smackdown all over town for months leading up. For Dynamite I only saw the announcement in OKC and then the initial on sale announcement on Facebook. They gotta advertise better.

you comin to Tulsa?

 

The peacock PLE deal ends at the end of 2025 I believe; I’d be curious who gets that.

 

yeah, hopefully. I'm just being really pessimistic

 

it does seem like a consistent thing is people saying "i had no idea AEW was coming here" so yeah they need to get ads/promotion in order

I'll definitely be there, but learning my lesson from the last show and waiting until closer to the date to get tickets. I looked last week and tickets similar to the last show were like $60ish

 

Okada is going to become a Lex Offender in NXT

 

The Rock is currently pushing a Mania match with Roman very hard right now on First Take

 

Feel like with the way rights are going, WWE are going to be losing a ton of value if Netflix extend it out past 10 years.