It was a huge week for wrestling, with the biggest news story being Monday Night Raw going to Netflix. There had been speculation that Raw would head to streaming but it was Amazon Prime that received the bulk of the speculation. The deal cost $5 billion (yes, with a “b”) and is to begin in January 2025.

Other big news:

-TNA ran their first TV show back under their old name. I signed up for a month of TNA+ just to watch it and I plan on changing it to a yearly subscription because holy shit it was great. I watched a few other recent episodes and they were great too.

-The Rock is going to be on the TKO board now.

-AEW’s ticket woes are getting worse, with Dave Meltzer comparing it to 2000 WCW. Ouch! Ratings are decent (not great but not low enough to make WBD concerned) but ticket sales have consistently gone down. The key areas to blame for this are the high prices, constantly running discounts as they get closer to the show (pissing off the people that bought early), a rotating cast of top stars (in WWE, you’re guaranteed to see Cody or Seth at Raw; in AEW, you’re not guaranteed MJF or Jon Moxley), and AEW’s piss poor marketing.

-Kevin Patrick is expected to be off of Smackdown’s announce team. His replacement hasn’t been announced yet.

-William Regal was back on TV last night!

-The Royal Rumble is this weekend and it’s expected that either Cody Rhodes or CM Punk will win it, especially after their instantly iconic staredown on Raw this week.

Best match of the week: Josh Alexander vs. Will Ospreay

Worst match of the week: Shayna Baszler and Zoey Stark vs. Candice LeRae and Indi Hartwell (the match itself isn’t very good but what gets it the worst spot is LeRae and Hartwell’s promo that things were going to be very different for them in 2024; this match was instead more of the same)