Kenny Omega Never Felt AEW Was In a War With NXT
AEW may have sole possession of Wednesday nights (once the NBA Playoffs are done), but Kenny Omega never saw the night as a battle with NXT. Omega was the guys on the latest PWI Podcast and talked about the end of the “Wednesday Night War” and more. You can check out the highlights below, per Wrestling Inc:
On the ‘Wednesday Night War’ ending: “For me, and I’m sure people in my company will be reading this and hearing this, and that’s fine. This is my true honest feeling. I never felt one way or another towards the war, if you can call it that, I wouldn’t call it that. I knew we would tell different stories in our company. I knew we would show different types of matches in our company. I can only control what I have a hand in, and that would be my stuff and variety of other things that may or may not be on the show. And I’m sure the Bucks feel the same way.
“For NXT to have moved to Tuesday, I mean sure, great. I just feel like now, I never felt like it was a battle for Wednesday. I feel like it’s a battle across the board. There’s so much wrestling every day during the week. I try to think back to when I was a fan, and I thought I was a mega fan, when I was watching wrestling but not doing it. And even still, I think at the height of my fandom, I couldn’t watch the amount of wrestling that’s available to us today. Couldn’t do it five, seven days a week. I just couldn’t do it. So for me, the real war is ‘how do you get the eyeballs for your day of the week?’ We’re not battling for Wednesday, I feel like I’m battling for the week. You know what I mean?”
On being happy for his friends in NXT who are doing well: “The thing is there’s so many great wrestlers doing it. And there is no one roster on the planet that has all the greatest athletes and talent. It doesn’t exist. There’s always going to be one or two guys somewhere else that could fit in and put great work in anywhere. It’s just ‘how do you be different enough or how can you sort of get those eyes on your product by doing something different than anyone else is doing, in that week?’ And that’s sort of been the name of the game for me. The Wednesday night thing, I love a lot of those NXT guys. A lot of them are my friends. I love to see them doing well, I love it when I hear when they’ve had a good match or performance. It’s great. If I heard the card in advance and I knew two of the guys, for example, I’m a big fan of Adam Cole and Kyle O’Reilly. If I knew they were going to have a great match on Tuesday, I’d be like ‘hey, maybe that’s something worth checking out guys.’ And for me, there’s a lot of people that I don’t really know. I also like brushing up on the new faces.
“Again, like I said, whether it be RAW, Smackdown, Impact, Ring of Honor, AEW, NXT, New Japan, AAA, CMLL, Stardom, whatever. There’s so many streaming services available at all varieties of times. And I think all we can do, as AEW, is whatever it is that we advertise, whatever it is we set out on doing (matches, special guests), we need to maximize the opportunity to make it the most entertaining amount of time on the show as possible. We just can’t take it for granted, we can’t be complacent, because we want to stick around for awhile. We want to have this company for awhile, we want TNT to be happy with us and keep us on board. I feel it’s almost like we’re not, in a way we’re competing against other companies, but I’m more just trying to attract viewers. And the best case scenario is I’m not trying to steal viewers watching another product. I’m want brand new viewers that watch what we do and say ‘hey this is pretty fun, or funny, or dramatic or whatever.’ And they tell a friend, and then they tell a friend, and then now we have these new viewers who are watching what we do and enjoying our product. So absolutely I’m not competing to steal wrestling fans from other companies, because a lot of them watch everything anyway. I just want those fans to enjoy our product, because they’re the back bone of all of wrestling right now. They kept all of us afloat. But there’s also a very, there’s a huge importance to me anyway to attract the new fan, people who haven’t watched anything, and make them fans of AEW.”
