Stone Cold Steve Austin Says That AEW Being Around Is Good For Competitors Like WWE
Photo by George Napolitano/FilmMagic
Stone Cold Steve Austin recently sat down with Nick Hausman of Wrestling Inc. to discuss a myriad of topics, one of which included AEW.
Austin was asked if he had the opportunity to spend time watching AEW programming and Austin said, “Man, I love it. I think it’s competition by proxy just because they’re wrestling, WWE’s wrestling, but I don’t think they’re directly trying to compete. But, in essence, they are. I love it because it gives more people within the industry jobs, it gives more people a chance to work, and it makes WWE — it forces them to push the envelope rather than just sit back and just push out content. Competition makes everybody better, I’ll bottom line it like that without going into minutiae and details.”
Austin said that the goal should be to get better ratings and not put the competitor out of business. He said, “Then the product is better because you’re forced, ‘Hey man, what are these cats doing over here? Pretty good stuff. What are we doing? We need to up it a little bit.’ So, yeah, that checks and balances…To answer your question, AEW is a good thing. It’s a good thing for everybody, including WWE.”
AEW Dynamite is averaging around 800-850k viewers each week while WWE RAW & SmackDown bring in between 1.7-2M. With NXT moving to a new night shortly, it will be interesting to see if AEW can consistently bring in over a million. You can check out the entire interview Nick did with Stone Cold below.
Thanks to Fightful for transcriptions
READ MORE: Steve Austin Reveals How Chris Jericho’s ‘Broken Skull Sessions’ Appearance Came Together