Former WWE Undisputed Champion Roman Reigns and his advocate Paul Heyman were interviewed by Bloomberg’s Kim Bhasin and Scarlet Fu at the Power Players in New York event on Wednesday. Scroll down to watch the entire Q&A. Here are some highlights.
Roman Reigns talking about Monday Night RAW going to Netflix:
“I think this is the biggest deal of all time, to be honest but the thing that changes the whole landscape for us is that we’ve been on linear television for decades now, and we’ve been the leader of that episodically. So to take our program and to put it on a streaming network like Netflix, it’s just unheard of. I mean, to go all the way back through our history to see where we are now, and the growth that we’ve had really since 2020 when the world was upside down, has just really been amazing. So it’s a big opportunity for us to not only showcase our product, but just what we’ve mastered with live television.”
Reigns was asked if we can expect and edgier product when RAW goes to Netflix:
“I have always enjoyed the challenges of being PG and no offense to our predecessors and the people who came before us and the ratings that they revolved around, but to me it’s more challenging to be able to tell these stories, and then it also allows you a broader audience to connect to, which I just really feel like is always the goal. We want to reach as many people as possible and I think there’s a fine limit to when you can kind of cross that threshold to where you push people off of the product. So I think there’s a nice, you know, there’s going to be a nice little range there that we can play with and push the envelope in certain senses, but I think we need to stick to our values and kind of the morals that we’ve set in place and the culture that we have now.”
Paul Heyman talking about the TKO merger with WWE:
“It’s tremendous business by UFC and tremendous business by WWE, and it’s a star and story driven industry, and the top star is Roman Reigns. So again, I will give all the credit in the world to Nick Khan because that is a business leader the likes of which I’ve never experienced. Paul Levesque has been trained to do this job his entire life, but I’ll also say Mount Rushmore only needs three heads, and the third one is Roman Reigns.”
If you use any portion of the quotes from this article please credit Bloomberg Live with a h/t to WrestlingNews.co for the transcription.
