CW President Admits WWE RAW and SmackDown Exceeded Budget Limits

WWE is undergoing a period of significant transformation and expansion, highlighted by NXT’s upcoming move to the CW Network. Additionally, the CW Network President recently acknowledged that RAW and SmackDown were outside of their budgetary constraints.

NXT has been televised on the USA Network for a long time, but that will end in October this year, as the show will be airing regularly on the CW Network going forward.

It was also reported that WWE and Netflix confirmed their huge deal to move Monday Night RAW to the streaming service, which will begin in January 2025. The reported deal, valued at over $5 billion for a duration of ten years, shocked fans all over the world and the deal was announced on January 23rd.

In a conversation with Joe Otterson of Variety, CW President Dennis Miller discussed the network’s acquisition of NXT and admitted that Monday Night RAW and Friday Night SmackDown were above their budget.

“We knew that ‘Raw’ and ‘SmackDown’ were a little bit beyond our budget here,” Miller said. “Then if you look, we have a lot of sports where we have kind of that next tier moving into the first tier here, whether it’s the Xfinity races leading into the Cup, or it’s NXT leading into ‘Raw’ and ‘SmackDown.’ So it just started to fit. Then over the course of a couple of months, we went back and forth and got the deal done.”

NXT will also continue to air on Tuesdays after it moves to the CW Network in October this year. WWE is also pulling in substantially more money with their CW deal. It remains to be seen whether NXT will see more changes once it moves to the CW Network in October this year.

Are you looking forward to NXT moving to the CW Network? Let us know in the comments section below!