AEW President Tony Khan appeared on CNBC this morning to talk about the wildly successful All In pay-per-view event this Sunday from Wembley Stadium in the UK that has drawn over 80,000 fans. Here are the highlights:
Financial success of All In:
“We’re going to make a ton of money on All In, frankly, before the pay-per-view. It’s already a wildly profitable event based on the ticket sales, which are massive, in the neighborhood of $10 million in tickets we’ve sold. It’s really exciting. We’re going to have 80,000 fans at Wembley Stadium. It’s going to be all kinds of attendance records. And also just a great, great evening of pro wrestling in England. The pay-per-view advances have also been incredibly strong. Our biggest in years, one of our top two of all time, and possibly our biggest ever for pay-per-views when it’s all said and done. But it’s also so huge as a live event that it’s already guaranteed to be a big profitable event.”
The success of the AEW Fight Forever video game:
“I’m very excited. The game has been a very successful launch. We’ve made great revenues back. Also, we’ll have Stadium Stampede mode coming soon to Fight Forever. The video game, which is the aforementioned title we were just talking about and has been a great success for us. A very great launch in our first video game ever, which is a great new revenue stream for a company that’s less than five years old.”
AEW branching out to other revenue streams:
“Absolutely. There are great new revenue streams opening up to us. The video game space is very exciting. We’ve got great action figures. T-shirt sales are going to be through the roof when we go to Wembley Stadium. I’m bringing a lot of shirts, I can assure you, and we’ve got a lot of very exciting revenue streams. But really the biggest revenue streams in pro wrestling are the big three. Typically with your live events, your TV in particular, the US TV rights are very strong, but also for us, our TV in the UK is massive. We are the number one company by all major business metrics now in the UK because we have by far the biggest weekly TV audience with AEW on ITV, and now we’ve put on the biggest event with Wembley Stadium this Sunday. So it’s very exciting with All In coming to England, which is one of the biggest markets and that is a place where it is not just a challenger brand. We are the industry leader and certainly those live events, those TV rights and the pay-per-view fees and streaming revenues, which is exciting for us because we haven’t even tapped into the biggest source of streaming revenues yet. Warner Brothers Discovery are amazing media partners we’ve been with since the very beginning. They have exclusive streaming rights, and we’ve built an amazing library now with over 200 episodes of Wednesday night Dynamite, and over 100 episodes of Friday night Rampage. And now we have just started. We have ten episodes of Saturday night Collision and over 20 massive pay-per-views, including what’s coming this Sunday with All In. It all makes for hundreds of great hours.”
Possible AEW streaming service or airing AEW content on Warner Bros. Discovery’s service, MAX:
“I think there’s a lot of great possibilities. You know, we have a streaming service overseas outside of America that is very successful with AEW Plus that’s doing great revenue and has seen major growth this year and has grown so much in just a few years and turned into one of the top wrestling subscription services that’s only available outside of America, which is the primary driver of revenue in pro wrestling, even though it’s available in 150 countries around the world. The international revenue is great, too. But frankly, America, the revenue you drive out of there is in many ways the strongest individual point certainly, and I think those US streaming rights are very valuable. So potentially, we could land, I would love to be on MAX, and I think that would be an amazing thing. And MAX is certainly my favorite streaming platform and it is the streaming platform of my bosses at Warner Brothers Discovery, the people who carry AEW in the US, India, and many great territories. And I believe that together we can come up with something really special. But it was up to me. I would love to land on MAX, home of all my favorite shows.”
More than 80k tickets have been sold for Sunday's AEW All In rumble at Wembley Stadium. CEO Tony Khan has big plans to capitalize on that success from streaming to video games. And find out which streaming platform is his favorite.@willkoulouris @tonykhan #AEWdynamite #FulhamFC pic.twitter.com/BMJ3DJuCSk
— CNBC's Street Signs (@StreetSignsCNBC) August 22, 2023
If you use any portion of the quotes from this article, please credit CNBC with an h/t to WrestlingNews.co for the transcription.
