Warner Bros. Discovery and All Elite Wrestling reached a multi-year renewal of its media rights agreement that will provide wrestling fans with the widest available access ever to the franchise’s most popular programming, streaming for the first time on Max.
The David Zaslav-led media giant will remain the exclusive home of AEW Dynamite, which will air Wednesdays on TBS, and AEW Collision, which will air Saturdays on TNT, with “enhanced distribution rights across social platforms as well as building opportunities for additional AEW programming for linear and digital platforms in the future.”
Additionally, all AEW Dynamite and Collision programming will stream live on Max for the time ever, exclusively to U.S. subscribers. All AEW programming airing on WBD’s networks will also be available to stream on demand on Max and the two parties will collaborate to distribute live pay-per-view events on Max at a discounted price per event, with all marketing and promotions of those PPV events exclusively centered on Max.
AEW PPV distribution on Max will begin later in 2025, with additional information and pricing to be shared in the coming months.
The extension coincides with the five-year anniversary of the premiere of AEW Dynamite on TBS.
“It has always been my intention and it is my long term focus to keep AEW on TNT and TBS,” AEW president Tony Khan told TheWrap. “There’s such a great history of pro wrestling here on these channels, and I’m honored now that AEW has been here with the Turner family for five years and we’ll be here for many more years as well. So it’s really very exciting.”
WBD U.S. Networks chairman and CEO Kathleen Finch told TheWrap the addition of AEW to Max would “turbocharge” the franchise’s growth by exposing it to a new audience. This year alone, AEW programming has reached over 33 million fans across TBS and TNT.
“We just see this as such an exciting evolution in what’s already been such a terrific partnership,” Finch said. “When you look at the incredible ratings that AEW brings on a live basis to linear television, that shows that there is a really healthy, passionate audience base. So we are very, very optimistic about the potential on Max.”
The AEW deal marks the latest effort by WBD to bolster its sports rights portfolio after the NBA rejected the company’s matching rights proposal and opted to strike deals with NBCUniversal, Amazon and Disney’s ABC/ESPN that will take effect in the 2025-2026 season and run through 2032.
While WBD has sued to enforce its matching rights, analysts expect that a loss of the NBA will impact their negotiating leverage in future carriage negotiations. Currently, TNT gets approximately $3 per pay-TV subscriber – one of the most expensive networks to carry.
Outside of AEW, Warner will offer live coverage of the upcoming MLB postseason, NHL and NBA regular seasons, NCAA Men’s March Madness, US Men’s & Women’s National Team soccer matches, Bellator MMA, Mountain West college football, MotoGP, FIA World Endurance Championship and world cycling. Starting in 2025, NASCAR, Roland-Garros tennis and Big East men’s and women’s college basketball will also be added to the line-up.
“Anything that we can do to keep our businesses strong and to keep our fans coming back bodes well for our carriage negotiations,” Finch said. “One of the things that’s so valuable to us is the fact that AEW is a 52-week proposition. AEW is all-year long and the storylines are long and Tony and his team are constantly bringing in new characters and new plots and new reasons for people to tune in and to introduce new fans to the genre. So it has a special superpower that really gives TNT and TBS an opportunity in all of our negotiations and ad sales as well.”
Meanwhile, outside of sports, Max offers live 24/7 news coverage through CNN Max and WBD is ramping up its programming investment in TNT with an acquisition of The Librarians: The Next Chapter,” a sequel to supernatural adventure series “The Librarians,” and an order for “Debriefing the President” (working title), a four-hour miniseries about CIA analyst John Nixon’s 2003 interrogation of Saddam Hussein. Warner also plans to leverage its vast movie library to reboot several films into made-for-TV movies or series for TNT.
“We’ve got a great complement of sports that are on the network now and more coming and we’ve increased some of our scripted content, which we’re going to be releasing in 2025,” Finch said. “We are serving a lot of different audience cohorts with TNT content and our goal always is to bring people in with slightly adrenaline-infused, fun, must-see content, because that’s what works. So viewers come in for AEW, they come in for other sports, they come in for these great movies we’ve got and we’re really leaning into the kind of mood that the audience might be in, which is excitement, adrenaline, fun energy. Our effort is to keep TNT at the top of everybody’s must-see list.”
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