Pro wrestling promotion at a crossroads

To be clear, the 250th episode of AEW Dynamite is a cause for celebration.

But as All Elite Wrestling approaches its latest milestone, it’s also impossible to ignore the uncertainty currently surrounding the pro wrestling promotion.

First, the good.

While AEW owner/president/co-founder Tony Khan has never been shy to celebrate his company’s successes, the 250th episode of its flagship show is undeniably impressive. In terms of nationally televised weekly pro wrestling shows, Dynamite is nearing the second-most ever for a non-WWE product and is on pace to eclipse WCW Nitro ‘s mark of 288 episodes early next year. And with all due respect to TNA Wrestling — whose flagship show, Impact! lays claim to 963 weekly episodes dating back to 2004 — the promotion has failed to find the same relative success or occupy the same space in the cultural zeitgeist that AEW has already achieved in its first five years of existence.

In terms of becoming a viable No. 2 pro wrestling promotion and mainstream alternative to WWE, AEW has unequivocally succeeded. And while the company has yet to reach the same heights WCW did in temporarily overtaking WWE as the top pro wrestling promotion in the late 1990s, it’s on track to eclipse its longevity, which is no small feat for a company that started from scratch a half-decade ago.

Now for the bad.

While Dynamite is on track to surpass Nitro in total weekly episodes next April, the reality is that nobody can say for certain whether or not that will actually happen — at least not on a major television station. That’s not to say AEW’s in danger of going out of business; it’s almost assuredly not. But until the promotion signs a new media rights deal to succeed its current one that expires at the end of the year, it’s impossible to know much about the future of the company.

At its best, AEW’s next media rights deal will make the company profitable for the first time in its existence and solidify its status as a legitimate mainstream alternative to WWE for years to come. At its worst, AEW could be searching for a new television home in a landscape seemingly lacking in suitors for the No. 2 pro wrestling promotion, to say nothing of the budget issues a lackluster media rights deal would likely result in.

To this point, there hasn’t been much public speculation regarding AEW’s next media rights deal, which is odd considering that most seem to believe that its exclusive negotiating window with its current partner, Warner Bros. Discovery, expired at the start of July. To this point, most of the public information regarding AEW’s negotiations has come from Khan, who said on June 27 that his company was in “the red zone” for a new deal with WBD .

And yet, no such agreement has been announced.

Potentially complicating AEW’s ongoing negotiations is the reality that its ratings have dwindled and general popularity has declined, as most — if not all — of WWE’s metrics have skyrocketed since its merger with UFC parent Endeavor and the resignation of disgraced founder Vince McMahon earlier this year. In terms of a contract year, it would be hard to imagine AEW having a worse one. And you’d have to imagine that has been a factor in its ongoing negotiations.

Perhaps most alarmingly, there isn’t any reason to believe AEW will be bucking its recent trend anytime soon. While there are arguments you could make for its ratings not being as bad as they seem, there’s no denying that its attendance has plummeted , even after the high-profile signings of Mercedes Moné (formerly Sasha Banks), Will Ospreay and Kazuchika Okada earlier this year.

As for the reasons behind AEW’s decline, there are several factors at play. That includes the drama surrounding CM Punk, who was fired for cause (and later returned to WWE ) after two years with the company. It’s also worth noting that AEW’s decline and WWE’s rise seemingly coincided with Cody Rhodes’ departure from the former, which preceded a historic (and still ongoing) run with the latter.

Speaking of Rhodes, while the current WWE champion has been careful not to criticize the company he co-founded since leaving it in early 2022, he deviated from that approach earlier this week when he took issue with comments his fellow co-founders, Matt and Nick Jackson (The Young Bucks), made about his role in creating the company in their recent book.

“I hated that in The Young Bucks’ book, they said I was last to the signing [with AEW]. Because that’s a big thing,” Rhodes told Chris Van Vliet . “Some of the AEW defenders who don’t realize they’re turning people off to their product more than they’re turning people on, that’s one of the things that people always cite: ‘Oh, he was last, he wasn’t that big a deal to the origin.’ No, this guy here, who’s off camera, was the first person to ever meet Tony and he met him in a vetting process for all of us. ”

How much of a role Rhodes’ departure has been a factor can be disputed, but there’s no denying that AEW has done something to run off a not-insignificant portion of its fanbase. What it does to rectify that moving forward could prove pivotal as it approaches both its next milestone show and the deal that may very well determine how many more milestones it sees.

The post As AEW approaches ‘Dynamite’ 250, the promotion is at a crossroads appeared first on Awful Announcing .