AEW President Tony Khan has shot down recent reports surrounding AEW pay-per-views following comments from Dustin Rhodes.
Two night pay-per-views in wrestling have become a reality in recent years with both New Japan Pro Wrestling’s Wrestle Kingdom and WWE’s WrestleMania becoming two day extravaganzas.
Speaking at Terrificon, Dustin Rhodes indicated that AEW could be set to become the latest promotion to switch to weekend affairs for certain events:
“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. It’ll be like a WrestleMania experience, you have two days of Double or Nothing or two days of All Out or Revolution.”
Appearing on Busted Open Radio, Tony Khan has now set the record straight on AEW pay-per-views and says that two day events are not in the works:
“We have these big pay-per-view events and have built up these franchises with Revolution, Double or Nothing, now Forbidden Door, All Out coming up, and to end the year we have Full Gear. It’s really cool, the growth we’ve had on pay-per-view, lots of exciting things happening.”
“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. 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. 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.”
“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 on-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 will present their next pay-per-view, All Out, on one day and one day only – September 4th – live from the Now Arena in Chicago, Illinois.