WWE Is Coming To Netflix, And Here's What That Means For All The Marks Out There
After over 30 years and 1500 episodes, it was announced today that WWE's flagship program, "Raw," (or "Monday Night Raw") is exiting the linear television landscape and becoming a streaming exclusive for Netflix. The streaming juggernaut will become the exclusive new home for "Raw" starting in January 2025 in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Latin America, among other territories. Over time, more regions will be added as part of the deal. Eventually, the other WWE weekly programs like "SmackDown" and "NXT" will also join the Netflix family once their existing deals with USA Network and The CW expire, as will additional programming like documentaries, original series, and other future projects.
Considering WWE has its own production studio, it would be unsurprising if Netflix became the new exclusive distributor of WWE Studios, although this has yet to be confirmed. But what is potentially the biggest get outside of "Raw" is that Netflix will also become the home of WWE's Premium Live Events (formerly known as Pay-Per-Views) including the Big 5: "Royal Rumble," "SummerSlam," "Money in the Bank," "Survivor Series," and "WrestleMania."
"This deal is transformative," said Mark Shapiro, TKO President and COO of Netflix. "It marries the can't-miss WWE product with Netflix's extraordinary global reach and locks in significant and predictable economics for many years. Our partnership fundamentally alters and strengthens the media landscape, dramatically expands the reach of WWE, and brings weekly live appointment viewing to Netflix." In case you stopped watching WWE after The Rock and Stone Cold stopped appearing every week, "Raw" is currently the most-watched show on USA Network, bringing in over 17.5 million unique viewers every year. As huge as this is for WWE and Netflix, it's concerning for USA Network as cable viewership numbers continue to plummet. Can they survive without their most popular program?
Netflix spent $5 billion on the deal
The WWE and Netflix deal comes with a pretty hefty price tag, with the streamer paying $5 billion (with a "B") over the next 10 years. Sure, they gave Ryan Murphy over $300 million for a five-year deal only for him to immediately jump ship and head over to Disney once the contract expired, but this is FIVE. BILLION. DOLLARS. Roman Reigns makes an estimated $5 million a year with WWE, so this is the equivalent of renewing his contract for 1,000 years (and they'll keep a belt on him the whole time, I swear to god). As a wrestling fan, it makes perfect sense, because WWE is absolutely worth $5 billion considering its built-in global audience and the fact the company's live productions are already a well-oiled machine. WWE has been providing shows on cable TV for decades, but also buy-in PPVs, on their former WWE Network streaming service, and now with Peacock.
This is a welcome change for wrestling fans because while the WWE Network was a sincerely great app, the move to Peacock has been less-than-stellar as the search function isn't great and the live event stream crashes due to the massive swells in viewership. Netflix can definitely handle the volume. This is also yet another savvy business move from WWE because, despite the endless list of unethical or questionable decisions made over the years, the folks in charge aren't stupid. They realized early on that the money was not in making your own streamer and trying to compete with an increasingly congested landscape, but instead hopping onto an already established success story. In the world of streaming, that's Netflix.
But this deal certainly deserves an eyebrow raise coming from the streamer who cancels shows constantly and helped elongate the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes because they don't want to pay more in residuals. You've got $5 billion for WWE but not season 3 of "GLOW?" I see how it is ...
The ratings wars are over
In news that might be disappointing to some but a pleasant surprise for others, this basically puts an end to the "ratings wars" between WWE and its main competitor, AEW. If you're not a wrestling fan, you might not know that one of the most prominent (see: obnoxious and annoying) conversations taking place each week in wrestling fandoms is looking at the viewership numbers between WWE shows and AEW shows. It's a holdover from the Monday Night Wars era between September 1995 and March 2001, when "Monday Night Raw" from WWE (at the time, WWF) and WCW's "Monday Nitro" were broadcast at the same time in a battle for Nielsen ratings.
This time period had a massive overlap with what is known as the Attitude Era, aka the time period that made Stone Cold Steve Austin, The Rock, Mick Foley, Triple H/D-Generation X, Chyna, The Brothers of Destruction (The Undertaker and Kane), and Kurt Angle household names. It's also probably when a lot of the non-wrestling fans reading this article last willingly caught an episode of "Raw" that wasn't a clip or gif posted on Twitter/X.
Netflix is notoriously dodgy about transparently reporting their viewership numbers, but then again, WWE has been beefing up their attendance numbers for PPvs for years. Nevertheless, the marks that actually care about the ratings numbers and believe it to be a sign of quality (they're the "box office success = movie is good" dorks of the wrestling world) will likely just find a new metric to fixate on, like subscriber numbers or the stock market or something.
What about WWE's existing contracts?
The Netflix deal doesn't start until 2025, which is curious considering WWE's current deal with NBCUniversal/USA Network expires in October of 2024. It's doubtful that the channel will want to sign a short-term deal for 2-3 months knowing the program is going to head to Netflix immediately after. As of publication, where "Raw" will broadcast during those few months has yet to be announced. Perhaps Peacock, who currently owns the rights to the entire WWE library of past programming until 2026, will serve as the interim platform. It would be similar to the way Paramount+ has the rights to new "South Park" movies while Max has all of the past episodes. "SmackDown" and "NXT" won't join Netflix until their existing deals run out, so it'll be a while before all of WWE is under one roof once again.
This does, unfortunately, feel like Peacock is being hit with Netflix's biggest finishing move. Wrestling is having a massive resurgence right now, with "The Iron Claw" being one of the most talked about films of 2023 and Paul Walter Hauser even throwing an indie wrestling promo into his acceptance speech at the Emmys. Wrestling fever is heating up and Netflix is smart to make its move now. With "Raw" sitting on the same viewership carousel as "Stranger Things" and whatever true crime docuseries du jour trends that week, the curiosity will certainly garner some new fans. The deal announcement came before the Netflix Q4 earnings report, which noted a subscriber base of nearly 256 million.
With this new deal, I don't think Netflix is dropping the subscriber belt anytime soon.