Why AEW Is Being Forced To Experiment With Collision
AEW is being forced to try something new with Collision but it means the show will stay on air instead of being cancelled.
AEW introduced Collision in the summer of 2023 as a new Saturday night show. Originally the show had CM Punk at its heart as he was kept apart from The Elite who stuck to Dynamite on Wednesdays. That all seems like a lifetime ago but Collision still airs on Saturdays which puts it head to head with some WWE PLEs badly affecting its ratings.
In March, Tony Khan will be experimenting with Collision as on the 22nd and 23rd of the month, two Collision shows will air back to back on Saturday and Sunday nights thanks to the NCAA basketball tournament on that weekend.
TNT Keeping AEW Collision On The Air
Speaking on Wrestling Observer Radio, Dave Meltzer explained the situation and noted the move to two shows on one weekend was TNT’s way of keeping the AEW show on the air:
So on the 22nd and 23rd in two weeks here with Collision, they’re doing an experiment. It’s going to be taped on Wednesday in Omaha. Just like they did last week in Sacramento, and this is the reason why, because TNT has the NCAA basketball tournament on that weekend.
And because of that, they’re trying to give them beneficial time slots. I mean, they could just cancel Collision if they [wanted to], and that would probably be the normal thing to do is just say in prime time we got NCAA basketball championships. That’s a lot bigger deal than AEW Collision or Dynamite or anything. NCAA Tournaments are a big deal.
But instead, they are going to do the thing where on both Saturday and Sunday night, they are going to go after the 8 pm game. The estimated time to start could be a little later, probably not earlier. It would be 11 pm Eastern and 8 pm Pacific because they’re going to be on staggered feeds Saturday and Sunday. They’re gonna do a one-hour show on Saturday night, and they’re gonna do a one-hour show on Sunday night.
They will be two different one-hour shows. They’ll be taping two hours of Collision, but one hour on Saturday and one hour on Sunday. And the idea is, is to give them the benefit of rather than do a two hour show with the second hour being from midnight to one, which where the ratings would fall, they’re going to give them one hour each night, coming right after the tournament game.
So, in theory they should get two big ratings, or at least the Saturday rating should be big, the Sunday because it’s unfamiliar, maybe not, because AEW doesn’t do well with unfamiliar time slots.