The Wrestling Thread: WWE WrestleMania XL - 6/7 April 2024

I'm sure Cain is still one hell of a fighter, but even compared to the smaller guys in WWE, he has the wrong look. It doesn't help that he isn't actually that famous outside of UFC, he doesn't look intimidating so in the WWE logic, he isn't a threat to Lesnar.

Never thought I would be one to think look is important, but when it comes to pro wrestling, you either have great ability, or a great look (and sometimes rarely, both). Cain doesn't look great, and he can't talk and from what I have seen he looks poor in the ring. If they put the title on him, it's going to flop.

Edit: Got to say, NWA Power is my show of the week pending AEW tomorrow (I figure WWE won't come close even with NXT). OK so the wrestling isn't great, but they really know how to build a story and have an incredibly underrated roster. Tim Storm seems to be on a really good story arc, Aldis is a great front man, the "broadcast team" are absolutely superb. Considering we get it totally free on YouTube, they have me hooked and I'll definitely be watching their PPV.

Anyone been following the latest WWE 2K20 release? Looking at all the videos, it looks like the most broken wrestling game ever released. To further add insult, they’ve even forgotten to put Edge’s signed photo in some special edition copies (he’s said he’ll sign them if you post it to him).

I’m presuming there’s a semi-decent game under all the issues, but the poor 90s wrestling games weren’t even this cynical. The gameplay may have been gooseberry fool, but they at least worked.

WWE games need to drop the annual number change and go back to giving them different names or themes each year. It’d be great if they based a whole game on redoing the Invasion storyline from 2001, seeing as they have the rights to use all the guys that weren’t there for the original one (nwo, Goldberg, Sting, Savage etc) they could just rewrite history in video game land! I’ve no doubt the games creative guys would do much better than the current real life creative too.

Watching Peter Avalon cut his promo on AEW Dark this week is half reminding me of Damien Sandow in WWE.

Wow, the Ultimate Warrior and Randy Savage models :dread:

Really have gone ‘90s tonight, the AEW stage is on the right. :datass:

Aside from NXT, I can’t even remember the last time a WWE arena show was filmed like this. Was always more common in WCW though, of course.

Aubrey Edwards really is a great referee, she already feels like their senior ref.

Chris Jericho and Inner Circle coming out and walking up to the the sky box through the crowd, distracting the crowd to a big reaction in the process, during a match. Yep, this is 1997 Nitro alright.

WE HAVE TICKETS

Absolutely bloody brilliant segment between Inner Circle and Cody.

This hour 15 has just blown on by, as well.

Looking forward to catching up tonight. Sounds like AEW put on another great show.

This was my favourite episode of Dynamite yet.

Lack of adverts on Fite certainly helps the flow (and TNT do seem to have a lot), but even so this 2 hours just zoomed by. And there was another 6 minutes after the show went off the air setting up a match for Full Gear, though I'm not sure if that will make the ITV edit.

Schiavone made a minor mistake at one point (he called Inner Circle The Dark Order) but Jim Ross was on fine form tonight. You can tell he's really getting back into the swing of things now, and he came out with the line of the night. Excalibur's voice meanwhile is young enough to still get really excited about stuff when necessary, so the balance and chemistry between the 3 is working well.

How AEW and NXT performed last night in the ratings:

Against competition from both the World Series and NBA, AEW viewership dropped for the third straight week, averaging 963,000 viewers last night.

That's down five percent from last week and is the first time Dynamite has fallen below a million viewers. In the key 18-49 demo, Dynamite averaged a 0.45, which was actually up two percent and good for fourth place on the night in all of cable.

NXT on USA also dropped for the fifth straight week, falling two percent to 698,000 viewers. Like AEW, the rating in the 18-49 demo was also up. It increased five percent to a 0.21 and finished 21st overall on cable for the night.

Aside from people over 50 -- where the WWE product had an advantage of 0.33 to 0.25 -- Dynamite beat NXT in every ratings demo.

The over 50 demo was obviously the strongest for NXT. AEW was strongest in the 25-54 demo, where they averaged a 0.46 rating. One demo where they completely dominated NXT was in young males (12-34), where they had an advantage of 0.43 to 0.12, almost four times as many viewers.

Game two of the World Series on FOX averaged 11.753 million viewers for the two hours that aired directly against the wrestling programming.

Night two of this year's NBA season, which was the first night of ESPN coverage, had two games. The first game, which aired opposite AEW and NXT as it will pretty much every week, averaged 1.698 million viewers and topped the cable TV ratings in the 18-49 demo with a 0.76. The World Series game did a 2.9 rating in that demo and obviously affected both wrestling and basketball.

https://www.f4wonline.com/aew-news/aew- ... nba-295726

WWE sure do have an old(er) audience. You’d think people like Dustin Rhodes, DDP and next week Rock n Roll Express would appeal quite a lot, but I guess they’re quite stuck in their ways in supporting WWE and it’s going to take a lot of effort to get them to try something new in AEW.

ITV are so strawberry floating gooseberry fool.

Went to bed last night about 10:40pm by which time, ITV Hub still hadn't put up Dynamite.

Think they've managed to hit their 7pm target once out of four episodes so far.

I also have zero confidence in them actually having a live feed of Full Gear on their box office channel.

Observer wrote:WWE numbers have been bad, as the 10/14 Raw did 38,000 viewers, down from 48,000 for the 10/7 show that featured Tyson Fury, who is a huge name in the U.K. Smackdown on 10/18 was down to 23,000 viewers. Raw on 10/21 did 3,000 viewers. It was so bad people thought it was a computer glitch but we’re told the data was sound and people are stunned with that very rating.

3k viewers in the UK. This would be the time ITV should be capitalising with AEW.

I think it's a combination of WWE running off 90% of their audience and Sky Sports more generally struggling as well with everything outside of Premier League and F1. The past couple of months they've been doing unprecedented discounting through NowTV (it was £10 for a month at one point).

BT have purchased a dud, but as we don't know what they paid for it, it could be costing them peanuts for hours of programming. There was a time you could add up all the replays of RAW (including highlights) and get a respectable number, but now it's not uncommon for it to be well under 100,000, with the majority of that boosted by the Sunday morning slot on Sky1 (comes in at the same 45 minute-ish length as if you watched the YouTube highlights from Tuesday back-to-back) which pulls in the real casual/kid audience.

This week's RAW did do its absolute best to be one of the most boring episodes I've ever seen, and at 3am that's death. There was also an NFL game on Sky Sports Main Event, so RAW was relegated to Arena or Action (which isn't available to BT customers). Never has a lack of star power, filled with wrestlers that just get no reaction whatsoever, been more apparent. The commentary is also now very flat, which makes it feel as if you're watching an elongated C-show like Superstars or Main Event.

Raw just has nothing of interest anymore. When I think back to the last segment I truly remember, it was the Festival of Friendship and that was over 2 years ago. If anything decent happens, as a UK fan you are better off ignoring the full Raw show and just catching the YouTube clips over breakfast.

Zellery wrote:I also have zero confidence in them actually having a live feed of Full Gear on their box office channel.

In fairness, their live box office shows have been perfect.

KK wrote:Jim Ross was on fine form tonight. You can tell he's really getting back into the swing of things now, and he came out with the line of the night.

Haven't listened myself but I've heard pretty much nothing but negativity on JR's performance this week. For example:

twitter.com/BossMoz/status/1187166150603329536

Possible some of his more dead pan, dry humour is now being lost on some. There was another moment in the night where Schiavone made a comment to Excalibur about there being an overabundance of planchas on the show. I don’t think either Schiavone or Ross are particularly fans of all the ‘flippy gooseberry fool’, tbh.

I can't stand JR on AEW, he barely hides his contempt for modern wrestling.

Also, Justin Roberts strawberry floating sucks.

The Wrestling Thread: WWE WrestleMania XL - 6/7 April 2024

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