>>14844096>coupled with a cheap third brand on a small network sinking the price tag of the overall value proposition.This point is not made often here but it is worth discussing. Dynamite consistently beats NXT and is up against stiffer competition most nights, so it is far from an apples to apples comparison between the two. Plus, AEW is new intellectual property and WBD has a stake in it, so there's upside there in the future. Live programming is live programming, and WBD needs live programming now more than ever.
But yes, there is no question that NXT going to CW for $25 million/yr for 5 years turned the negotiations between WBD and AEW on its head. Now look, AEW is going to stay on WBD. I guarantee it. But having NXT as a comparison point now (when they didn't before November) definitely impacted the ongoing rights renegotiation, because you have a property in NXT that outperforms some AEW programming, but is much cheaper to produce. The last point is important because WBD has a piece of AEW, so the ledger matters to them more than if they were just airing someone else's stuff (like USA, Netflix, and CW with WWE).
It's not discussed by either the WWE or AEW shills on this board but remember that WBD had the option to pick up AEW for all of 2024, and they exercised that open very late in 2023 - the week between Christmas and New Year's Eve has been speculated widely - and it's reasonable to assume WBD was playing a wait-and-see game to see how WWE's rights negotiations would shake out so they had an idea of what a new benchmark might look like. Obviously AEW wanted to get the extension done in 2023 so it could plan for the future with some budgetary accuracy. NXT signed onto CW in November, which in turn (speculating here) likely led WBD to an offer on a multiyear extension that AEW scoffed at. So WBD picked up the option year to buy time to see how much and where Raw & Smackdown would finish up.
