TNA Wrestling is already undergoing significant changes as it begins its rebranding, with Impact Wrestling reintroducing the TNA brand at the Hard to Kill pay-per-view event last month. It was TNA’s most successful pay-per-view event in recent years.
However, Scott D’Amore was removed as TNA President, and Anthony Cicione has taken his place, leaving talent dissatisfied with management.
While speaking on Wrestling Observer Radio, Dave Meltzer mentioned that TNA Wrestling plans to air live weekly television for its flagship show, TNA Impact, on AXS TV every Thursday. The promotion is also considering several venues, including Full Sail University, the former home of NXT TV before WWE relocated to the Performance Center during the pandemic.
“One of the things they’ve been looking at is, it’s just not going to happen anytime soon, but they want to go live. The idea is to go live and have like a location where they would go every Thursday. Full Sail University is one of the places that talked about, and there’s probably other locations as well, which would be really tough, because Orlando already has NXT, every Tuesday. But before he was ousted, Scott and Lou D’Angeli, and Ed Nordholm went to Full Sail and scouted it out. And that’s where they wanted to go. The one thing with Full Sail, if you remember it, it has a great look for television for a 300-400 seat building. You know, because a lot of those, like, a lot of the buildings of that size don’t really look good for TV. There’s some cost savings because you can do what NXT did, where you can have the students work on the shows, and it gives them work and work experience. So there’s that, and it’s something on campus that you can let the students in for free. And I thought Full Sail in NXT was a big success. They obviously made the move not to go back after the pandemic for whatever reason, I don’t really know. But yeah, that was talked about. Of course, Scott D’Amore’s not there anymore, but Full Sail, is still, one of the locations that are talking about, but the idea, the idea was under D’Amore, and it may be delayed, it may not some of the talent knows about this would be maybe a few test runs towards the end of the year. Then, the mentality was to live in 2025. And, of course, with D’Amore not there, they may also scrap that idea because it’s obviously a lot more expensive to run live every week than to tape in different cities where you can sell some tickets, although they don’t sell a lot of tickets. If you’re going to run every single Thursday night at Full Sail University, I mean, you’re gonna have to give those tickets away for free because it’s not like people are going to pay for tickets in that city every single Thursday night, and it’s not happening. So, but that was one of the ideas that was being worked on.”
(h/t to WrestlingNews.co for the transcription)
