For more than a year, AEW Dynamite and WWE NXT have been in head-to-head competition every Wednesdays and it was billed as the Wednesday Night Wars, but all of that came to and end when WWE NXT had their final Wednesday night episode on April 7th, which was Night One of their TakeOver: Stand And Deliver.
This was done due to WWE as well as NBCUniversal announcing that they have agreed to a new multi-year deal that will keep WWE NXT on the USA Network, but that the television show will move from Wednesday nights to Tuesday nights and the reason this was done was due to the NHL moving to the USA Network on Wednesday nights when NBCSN shuts down later this year.
NXT originally aired on the WWE Network, but was later moved to the USA Network to reportedly counter AEW Dynamite on TNT and NXT even started right before Dynamite started to air in 2019. When appearing on Cheap Heat with Peter Rosenberg, WWE COO Triple H said that the rivalry between NXT and AEW was an “imaginary war” and it’s just something people came up with, but the promotion looks at everything in entertainment as competition.
Top AEW Star Chris Jericho would then speak with Joseph Staszewski of the New York Post and commented on what Triple H had to say. Jericho said it will be there for the rest of time, it was an “imaginary war,” and if it wasn’t a war why did they take Wednesday night the exact same time that they had. The top AEW Star also said it was there to take away their ratings and for them not to get re-signed, but three months after that started, AEW was re-signed to a hundreds-of millions-of-dollars extension and WWE NXT failed.
This is what Chris Jericho said:
“It will be there for the rest of time, it was an ‘imaginary war,’ and if it wasn’t a war why did they take Wednesday night the exact same time that we had? It was there to take away our ratings and for us not to get re-signed. Three months after that started we were re-signed to a hundreds-of millions-of-dollars extension. They failed.”
“That’s typical WWE. It’s typical rhetoric. Because I believe that they congratulated us the first week and said, if you remember, ‘It’s a marathon, not a sprint.’ We won the marathon, right? So now it’s an imaginary war. Well, then why were they saying it’s a marathon, not a sprint a year-and-a-half ago when our first rating came out?”
During the time of the Wednesday Night Wars, AEW Dynamite won majority of the ratings war in terms of total viewership and key demographic numbers and they even garnered over 1 million viewers in each of the first two weeks after NXT moved to Tuesday nights.
