Below are some top WWE news stories of the day, involving RAW and NXT.
• Monday Night RAW is set to return to its original two-hour format after more than 12 years as a three-hour show. Starting on October 7, the program will air from 8 PM EST to 10 PM EST every week, continuing in this time slot until its final episode on the USA Network on December 30.
During an episode of Wrestling With Freddie, former WWE writer Freddie Prinze Jr. expressed concerns about the change, speculating that it could lead to more wrestlers being released.
Prinze Jr. noted that with less airtime available for matches and segments, WWE may find it too costly to retain talent who are not regularly featured. He added that with TKO now running WWE, the company could prioritize cost-cutting, leading to the release of underutilized wrestlers.
This, in turn, might create opportunities for those let go to join AEW or other wrestling promotions.
Here’s what Freddie said:
“They’re moving it and cutting it down to two (hours), which I’ve always thought is the perfect amount of time — I predict they will not have as many wrestlers on the roster as they currently do because there won’t be enough time. That’s a full hour less of matches, segments, storylines, backstage segments, promos in the ring… a full hour less, which means it won’t be cost-effective for them to carry that many wrestlers.
They are now owned by TKO, another corporation, and they will do a cost-effective… (they’ll think) ‘This wrestler’s not being used, cut them. This wrestler’s not being used, cut them,’ which gives more opportunities for wrestlers to go to AEW, to go to another brand if it goes out there.”
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• NXT is moving to The CW Network on October 1st and it’s going to mark the beginning of a lot of other changes that WWE is going to do.
Here’s what WrestleVotes reported:
“When they make their debut on CW, NXT episodes will no longer be available on Peacock. If you’re into watching the show after it airs a day later or whatever, you can’t do that any longer on Peacock.
In addition, Peacock is gonna start pulling NXT episodes that previously aired. We’re not sure if that’s the entire library dating back to Finn Balor and Kevin Owens and Shinsuke Nakamura and all that stuff from Full Sail that really got NXT going. We don’t know if that will disappear.
But it’s likely that everything from NXT 2.0 up until today will disappear and move over to the CW app. With that said, we don’t know if TakeOvers are included here.
Again, it could be just 2.0 stuff which would include Deadlines and No Mercy and things like that could disappear from Peacock. A lot of the more recent NXT stuff will be gone from the WWE Network/Peacock.”
