During the latest edition of his “The Extreme Life of Matt Hardy” podcast, AEW star Matt Hardy commented on AEW being competition to WWE, AEW having a long way to go to catch WWE due to them being around and on television for much longer, and more. You can check out some highlights from the podcast below:
On AEW competing with WWE: “AEW, obviously, we have a long ways to go before we catch up to the global enterprise that is WWE. There are no doubts about that, I mean, they’re huge. They just made their biggest profit ever, over one billion dollars. So I think AEW is just offering an alternative and we’re taking a different approach. The way we present wrestling and how it really has a diehard audience, and I think that’s something that in the big scheme of things is going to be good for WWE, Vince McMahon, and company. Because it’s going to force them to freshen up their product and do new things as well.”
On the creative freedom in AEW: “I could compare to a TNA when I was there doing the Broken Matt stuff. A place where, you know, you really have a lot of input with what you’re doing, or even the Ring of Honor runs I had as well. Like I would kind of be given a general idea and I would kind of fill in the details and that’s kind of how Tony Khan does it. He lets the guys paint their own pictures, make their own music. He has a presentation of like a story ‘this is what I’m thinking about for the story, you fill in the blanks.’ Where I feel like WWE has gone a little too specific where they want to tell every single part of this story but sometimes the person is performing a persona and it’s not really true to them. They don’t feel comfortable doing it, sometimes it shows. I feel it comes across the television screen.”
