WWE Almost Made Historic Change To Monday Night Raw

Triple H has given an insight into discussions about the future of WWE Raw.

On January 6th, WWE Raw will premiere on Netflix to formally kick off the monster new deal between the streaming platform and the sports entertainment giant. The staggering agreement unveiled in January 2024 is worth $500 million per year for the next ten years, with the option to extend for a further decade.

Unsurprisingly, WWE is doing everything possible to make the debut episode as special as possible, with a new logo and theme song set to be introduced. Meanwhile, it’s been announced that the episode will feature John Cena as he begins his retirement tour, while Roman Reigns faces Solo Sikoa in Tribal Combat, and Seth Rollins and CM Punk finally go one-on-one.

However, plans for Liv Morgan vs. Rhea Ripley have been changed. The Women’s World Title match had been scheduled to be Last Woman Standing, but the stipulation has been quietly dropped.

Interestingly, it seems there were almost even bigger changes.

WWE Was Open To Moving Raw

During an interview with Jimmy Traina on the SI Media podcast, Triple H admitted that executives did discuss moving WWE’s flagship show from Monday nights, but in the end, the decision was taken to leave it where it is.

“One of the things working best in WWE with the team of Nick [Khan], Lee Fitting, and many others, we’re all looking at what is the best way to do it. Forget what we have and what’s on the table.

Let’s look at it with fresh eyes and say, ‘If we were building this ground up, what would we do and how would we do it?’ Take all the things we know and factor in the whys and hows. Monday night was contemplated. Is that a move off of Monday? Is it stay on Monday? It’s also a 30-plus-year tradition. You have to factor that in. Plus, the business model and everything else.

I’m a big believer that you can work around all of those things. We weighed all of it out, as we always do, with the partners and ourselves, and we determined what was best and what was best was staying on Monday.

You can move and understand the global nature of WWE and Netflix. Yes, Monday is NFL, but that is not a factor in a lot of the world. There were a lot of factors heavily weighed.”

During the same interview, The Game admitted that Raw will have a “flexible” runtime when it finally moves to Netflix, noting the company won’t have to deal with traditional TV schedules as they have in the past. The comments came after SmackDown moved to three hours for the first time on January 3rd.

H/t to WrestlingNews.Co