AEW Dynamite To Reportedly Finish Before WWE SmackDown Starts On January 1
AEW Dynamite reportedly won’t overlap with WWE SmackDown on New Year’s Day.
On New Year’s Day, AEW Dynamite will air live on a Friday night. As such, talk began of whether they’d be taking on Friday Night SmackDown, with a recent report suggesting WWE weren’t planning to change from their plan to pre-tape the show in order to broadcast directly against their main rival. Now, a new update on the situation has clarified the two promotions won’t be competing after all.
According to Dave Meltzer on Wrestling Observer Radio, it’s believed AEW Dynamite will have concluded before SmackDown begins.
“In the Observer when I first got the news, I actually had a mistake there. On January 1st, I thought they [AEW] were gonna go head-to-head with SmackDown because they’re taping in Atlanta. I’ve since found out that the Dynamite show on January 1st, Friday is going to be after the [college football playoff] game. So it’s going to start around between 3:30 and 4 Eastern, and it’ll be over before SmackDown starts.”
-Dave Meltzer
Competition between WWE and AEW is something fans have become accustomed to over the last seven years, not least due to the counterprogramming seen as recently as the last few weeks. On September 26, All Elite Wrestling held All Out live from Chicago, while WWE taped Worlds Collide from the same city as they battled to lure fans to their respective event. Plus, on October 6, Dynamite moved to Tuesday when they held Grand Slam: France up against NXT.
However, in a reverse of what we saw earlier this month, next week’s NXT will encroach on Dynamite’s turf by taking place on Wednesday night. On that show, both Cody Rhodes and John Cena will be making an appearance. You can read more about that here.
As always, we’ll aim to provide any further updates on the January 1 AEW Dynamite as soon as we hear more.
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