Cody Rhodes recently did an interview with Yahoo.com and here are the highlights.
On what AEW’s focus is: “We don’t actively say, ‘Hey this is different, let’s do this,’ it’s more the personalities behind AEW — Tony Khan at the top, Matt, Nick, Kenny and myself — the personalities are just different and we are the ones who create those scenarios. We don’t have any of the template that WWE currently has. We’re open to everything, our bridges are open to all folks. When you have a wrestling company run by wrestlers, you cut out a lot of the bureaucracy, a lot of the red tape on situations like that. We don’t think about it being different, our focus is fun, and something like that was really fun.”
On if they’re worried about NXT: “There’s a romantic way to look at the ratings and say ‘Here we are, it’s the late 1990s again. Every Thursday let’s check ‘em.’ It’s fun to look at the ratings but I know internally we’re not having any pep rally speeches. Our concern is not NXT and I believe NXT’s concern is not us. If anyone is going to succeed, we cannot be a reactionary brand. One really good, positive takeaway that the ratings war doesn’t show is that there is a lot less crossover between the fan bases, there’s a lot less of the turning the channel between one and the other. That means there’s a lot of people just watching wrestling on Wednesday nights. Making wrestling destination programming again is cool.”
On their approach to TV: “I think a lot of us have pushed back on ‘less is more’ with what we actually do in the ring, but that approach to TV is very true. It creates the feeling that everything we are putting out for you in narrative is really important. Our titles, the fact that we only have the men’s, women’s and tag team championships at this point, we make them the most important thing from the company standard. When you approach it from that, you’re able to put things on a pedestal more and make things mean more from a narrative standpoint.”
