Cody Rhodes recently spoke with The Dallas Morning News. He was there to promote the next two AEW Dynamite events in Texas. One of the topics that came up was AEW’s reduced schedule as compared to WWE’s.
AEW holds only one show per week which is its weekly television show AEW Dynamite and one quarterly pay-per-view event.
WWE runs several live events each week along with their weekly television shows, Raw, SmackDown and now NXT. They also hold monthly pay-per-view events.
Rhodes said they want fans to focus primarily on Dynamite. WWE has too much content for fans to consume right now.
“Some people are free to do independent [shows] on the weekends where they can keep getting their reps in. Some other people don’t need the reps – like my brother [Dustin Rhodes, formerly known as Goldust in WWE], he’s had 20 years of reps. He’s TV-ready always, as kind of proven by this last week in there with The Young Bucks and Santana and Ortiz. I think it’s the way it should be.
“I think the model of the live event system, and I’m not trying to knock anybody, is antiquated. The last few years [I was] with WWE, those houses for live events and not TVs were pretty – they were good, they were a couple thousand – but they weren’t the same as the big TV spectacle. It just seems like you’re putting less of an emphasis on your show when you spread yourself out like that. So, I think everything is about Dynamite. To follow AEW, you’ve got to watch Dynamite. Dynamite’s our only show. Four pay-per-views a year. And everything that exists outside of that is shoulder content, it’s stuff you can watch if you want to. And if not, tune into Dynamite and be caught right up.”
