Or Maybe Levesque has been in wrestling since the early 90's and actually has a clue about a business he earned money in for decades, as opposed to a social awkward braggert who thinks he knows the business because he has a wrestling Observer subscription, some RF Shoot interviewDVD's, and the guys he is overpaying are stroking his ego for TV time.
This 40 years malarky is one of the poorer AEW excuses for it being a bad wrestling show that people dont want to watch. So in 35 five years from now by this logic, AEW will be a good wrestling show. We just have to wait...
The “40 years” specifically means generational awareness and involvement. I.e Person A watched WWF in the 1980s as a child. Loved it.
When they had children in the 2000s they took introduced them to WWE, making their children fans. Their children loved it.
Now in the 2020s one of those children is an adult and has a child. They want to show their child WWE, and start watching Raw or go to a live event.
Same logic in 1997 when Lucas released the special editions of the first three Star Wars films. Quite a number of adults took their kids to see them - because the adults loved the films from when they were children. It increased the segment of children watching Star Wars because you had a segment of parents actively introducing the product to their kids. That’s a benefit WWE enjoys that a newer product does not.
That said, it’s just a segment. Although in todays era it’s more difficult for a new property to break through (look at annual box office as an example, it’s in part consumer preference towards established IP driven), it can happen. ECW in 1994 and 1995 quickly established a completely different identity and rapidly built a loyal fanbase. They went from a marginal independent promotion that had a couple of hundred people in 1993 to consistently selling out Viking Hall in 1994. They were touring in Florida by 1995 and were heading for PPV in 1996 before the Mass Transit incident.
AEW’s challenge is that in some respects is that is seems that it is not run with the same pressures as let’s say the WWF of 1996. Tony Khan has an extremely wealthy family, was granted a large seed fund to get the company started, and can likely point to the fact that he was always expecting to run in the red until the company got its third content deal (which is what he’s working with WDB presently). That is likely what was pitched to Shad Khan before he got that seed fund. So he’s not necessarily that concerned about being $30M in the red for a given year because in theory the next long term deal will make the company whole. And then he can work towards keeping costs from spiraling.
The biggest issue though that some have said is that Khan is doing this all on his own. There is a reason Vince slept three hours. He tried to do it all too. He seemingly loved creative, but that’s not a 60 min meeting in a 10 hour day. Running a company of the size of the WWF in the Golden or Attitude Eta would have required endless meetings and phone calls. Some internal, some external. Creative was likely the dessert to him after dealing with everything else, but the point was that it took a 19 hour day to try to run everything himself.
By trying to run everything himself - including getting that new deal which he absolutely needs - he’s set himself up to have to work those 19 hour days. Otherwise something has to fall off. And most likely he cannot give the attention to Creative that he once did. And that’s where he needs to delegate.
