After Wednesday’s announcement of All Elite Wrestling’s WarnerMedia TV deal, both Cody Rhodes and Jim Ross spoke with Variety‘s Joe Otterson.
Rhodes on AEW’s footing within professional wrestling industry:
“The term people are using is ‘alternative.’ For many years throughout my youth and plenty of other fans’ youths, pro wrestling has been essentially just one company and that’s not really the case. I want to be the sports-centric alternative in the pro wrestling world and I think we’re on a good path to get there.”
Ross however dismissed the idea that AEW was necessarily going to challenge WWE directly, ala the “Monday Night Wars” of the late 1990’s and World Championship Wrestling:
“Competitive means being profitable. It doesn’t mean, ‘We have to have this to beat the WWE.’ Our job is not to worry about what WWE is doing, not their TV clearances, not whose in the main event, nothing. With a growing company there are a lot of growing pains. It’s a mix of creative and athletics and a lot of different things. Our focus has to be us, period.”