AEW Rumors: All Elite Wrestling will not have a department that WWE currently has
All Elite Wrestling is getting ready for the Wednesday Night Wars and the company has already planned a few things to make its product stand out.
As revealed by Dave Meltzer on the Wrestling Observer Radio, AEW will not be a scripted show as the promotion doesn't even plan on having a dedicated writing team. Wrestlers will be given the freedom to come up with storylines and promos.
He explained:
"I’ll tell you what, the one thing as far as Wednesday goes is it’s going to be a heavily scripted show vs a show with no writers. Legitamelty, they are not hiring writers, and we’re going to see a live 2-hour show with no writers, just wrestlers, you know, coming up with storylines, and going out there and have them cut promos and you know, knowing the bullet points. They want to memorize their promos, they can, if they don’t want to memorize their promos, they don’t have to. But there is not going to be any word-for-word stuff.
Let’s face it, a lot of the scripted promos. We’ve all complained about it forever for the obvious reasons they’re badly delivered and lifeless and all that. We are going into a new era or a new concept and we’ll see if pro wrestling needs scriptwriters to be effective to television."
This would be in stark contrast to the way WWE usually does things, as Vince McMahon's company is known to follow a tightly scripted format. Everything from the promos, to the way the segments are played out, is meticulously crafted by WWE's writing team.
Vince McMahon gives his seal of approval and most of the times makes large-scale changes to the script before or during the show.
However, even WWE is moving towards a different model as Dave Meltzer stated that most of the promos on this week's Raw weren't scripted word-for-word. The Paul Heyman effect? We certainly think so.
While AEW executives may claim that they don't intend to compete with WWE, the new promising new promotion would have no option but to put up a stronger product if they wish to rope in viewers. They will go head-to-head with WWE's highly acclaimed NXT brand on Wednesday nights and it would be interesting to see who prevails in the battle for supremacy.