Chris Jericho Thinks AEW Will Beat WWE Raw With Ratings Soon

Former AEW World Champion Chris Jericho believes that AEW will overtake Raw in the ratings within the next year.

Speaking with Busted Open Radio, Chris Jericho discussed NXT moving to Tuesdays earlier this year, ending the ‘Wednesday night wars’. Arguing that AEW has the potential to flat out beat WWE’s flagship show with ratings in a matter of months, Jericho said:

“Obviously, it’s a victory, and it’s a huge victory. The difference is that we weren’t obsessed with winning, losing, whatever it was. We were obsessed about was putting on the best show we could, and we couldn’t worry if WWE was gonna put NXT on or if NBC was going to resurrect the Beatles. Whatever you’re going to do, we can’t focus on that.

“We can’t worry about it because we’re too busy worrying about our own show. We’re too busy worrying about putting on great stories and great matches in the middle of a frickin pandemic so when we won the war and won handily, of course it was the end of NXT because that was kind of the whole idea was put them against us, build them as a huge third brand, and then move on.”

“When we, you know, beat them, that the word that you used, and now they’re kind of rebranding and reconfiguring because what else can they do? They’re number two when it comes to what they were trying to do in this battle. But here’s the best part, we were never worried about NXT and never really paid attention to what they were doing.

“We were looking at what Raw is doing and what Smackdown is doing. If you want to talk about a war, that’s the real war. If this was Game of Thrones, NXT was the first wave that we blew through.

“We’re storming the castle. We’re storming the fortress. I think that’s one of the things that’s going on now too when you see, oh this week AEW beat Smackdown and in the 18-49 demo or 18-34 demos. Even just winning one or two of those demos, that’s a big deal. Sooner or later, we’re going to start beating Raw.

“It’s not going to be every week, but I bet you over the next two to four months, maybe four to six, we’re going to start beating Raw and that’s my prediction that I’m saying to you guys right here. The reason for that is because, we keep talking about the cool factor, but it’s the storytelling and it’s that we don’t panic. We’re in no rush. We live in our own world, our AEW world.

“We book accordingly. We book smartly. If you watch our show, it’s like watching the first three Star Wars episodes. One thing always leads the next and sometimes you’ll see something where the seeds were planted months earlier, but we all know what we want to do and where we want to go.”

The September 1 episode of AEW Dynamite drew an average of 1.047 million viewers. For comparison, the August 30 edition of Raw was watched by 1.907 million viewers.

Tonight (September 5) at All Out, Chris Jericho faces MJF in a match where if he loses, he must retire from in-ring competition in AEW. It has been reported that All Out is expected to destroy the existing AEW pay-per-view record.

Transcription via Fightful. 

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• viewership
• Ratings
• chris jericho
• AEW

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