Posted in: AEW, Sports, TNT, TV | Tagged: aew, bleeding cool, cable, pro wrestling, streaming, television, tnt, tv, wrestling

AEW Made Profit in April, But Paid Everyone Same as Normal

The coronavirus pandemic may be bad for wrestling ratings, but at the very least, it didn't keep AEW from making a small profit in April. The company apparently both broke even and made a profit, according to Wrestling Observer Newsletter's Dave Meltzer, who apparently has a similar understanding of math as Scott Steiner. What Meltzer means is that the company didn't take a loss, even though they lost out on a ton of live gate revenue. Meltzer writes:

AEW did break even in April, actually making a very small profit. With television not being taped every week, it has reduced costs, although the reduction of costs is not enough to offset the loss of the live gates from what would have been five Wednesday night shows, but the reduction does partially offset that. The company turned a very small profit between the money from TNT for television, online merchandise money and costs being down by doing all the taping over two days in Decatur, GA.

While cutting costs by filming in two days may have helped AEW prevent a loss, they still made less money than they would have if their scheduled episodes of Dynamite had gone on as planned. However, a positive note from Meltzer's report is that everyone got paid as if they had been working the regular schedule, even though they got to spend most of the month at home.

This was done with paying everyone on staff and the talent, and the production crew was paid the same as they would have for weekly shows even though the shows were done in two days rather than five days. And there were cost savings by doing two shows where everyone was flown in and out once, as opposed to paying for everyone for five trips to various locations. But they would have likely had a very big month.

Meltzer says that the potential profits AEW could have earned would have offset losses from the previous startup year, but now that profitability will have to wait until later. Now that AEW is back to airing live shows, it will be interesting to see how they are able to keep from losing money. The Double or Nothing PPV coming up later this month should help, but it's unknown how the show will do considering ratings have been down.

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