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World Wrestling Entertainment continues work on locking in a new media rights partner for Monday Night Raw.
PWInsider.com can confirm that this past Monday morning TKO's Marc Shapiro as well as WWE's Nick Khan and Paul Levesque were in NYC at the Warner Bros. Discovery headquarters meeting with WBD executive Bruce Campbell about potentially moving Raw to the WBD family. Campbell holds the position of Chief Revenue and Strategy Officer.
We are told that the WWE contingent met with Campbell for several hours Monday morning with at least part of the meeting taking place in a conference room usually reserved for David Zaslav. Levesque was at Raw later that night in Cleveland.
Obviously, if a deal were to be made between those two entities, there would be massive ripple effects for professional wrestling, specifically because WBD's TNT and TBS have been the home for AEW programming since the fall of 2019. The belief is that AEW's current agreement with WBD runs through the end of the 2024 television season. Tony Khan noted that he met with WBD on 12/12 during Thursday's ROH Final Battle media call. That would have been the day after the WWE meeting.
With Smackdown going to The USA Network and NXT shifting to the CW Network, now WWE seeks a major increase in Raw media rights. Paul Levesque and Nick Khan were in Los Angeles several weeks ago meeting with potential partners and it is believed WBD was one of the potential partners they were meeting with at that point as well with Amazon also discussed internally within WWE at that point. We are told by WWE sources that there are still other suitors.
WBD's major goal of late has been to lock in the rights to the NBA, although David Zaslav had publicly stated the company "doesn't need" the NBA. We will see soon enough what WBD "wants" out of professional wrestling.
Stay tuned.
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