BREAKING: AEW To Announce TV Deal With WarnerMedia Next Week

According to an exclusive report from The Wrap, All Elite Wrestling is expected to announce a major television deal with WarnerMedia Entertainment next Wednesday morning, prior to the network’s 2019 fall upfronts. Negotiations between the two sides are said to be “virtually done” at this point.

While we’ll likely have more information after next Wednesday, The Wrap noted that AEW President Tony Khan and a collection of wrestlers will be at Madison Square Garden in New York next week in order to “pitch to media buyers”. The end result will be a weekly television series on TNT, beginning this fall.

This is obviously a major get for All Elite Wrestling. In 2018 TNT was praised in a year-end review by IndieWire for being one of the “few major cable networks that managed to either stay flat or post increases among both total viewers and adults under 50”.

TNT was ranked #14 on the list of most-watched networks in 2018, just barely trailing the #8 USA Network, home to both WWE Raw and Smackdown Live. The difference is, while USA actually dropped 9% of their userbase last year (11% among adults 18-49), the WarnerMedia network managed to gain a percent year-over-year.