FOX’s WWE SmackDown Gamble Isn’t Paying Off

WWE’s big move to FOX isn’t working out quite the way that either party expected it to. It might feel a little premature to say that after only a few weeks of programming on the flagship wrestling show’s new network, but both FOX and WWE were hoping for bigger things than this. Something has gone very wrong very quickly, and alarm bells will already be ringing on both sides of the deal.

SmackDown was a huge acquisition for FOX when they picked it up from the USA Network. The total deal that convinced the world’s most famous wrestling company to up sticks with one of their flagship shows and move it to a rival station was worth in excess of one billion dollars. WWE backed that up by signing another massive deal with the USA Network for Monday Night RAW and also signing a ten-year agreement for big money to do several shows each year in Saudi Arabia. As if that weren’t enough, the USA Network parted with even more cash to bring WWE’s third brand, NXT, onto its Wednesday schedule. Vince McMahon’s company has never had more money.

Because of all of that, we should be in a wrestling boom right now. Every network currently carrying WWE programming is promoting it heavily, and the company is spending massive amounts of cash on marketing. With everything taken into account, wrestling should be as hot as it was in the late 1990s when battles between ‘Stone Cold’ Steve Austin and the Rock had as many as six million people glued to their screens every single week. Unfortunately for everyone who has a financial interest in seeing that happen, there’s no sign of it. In fact, numbers are trending in a downward direction, and there’s no way FOX can’t be disappointed.

This past Friday night, FOX pre-empted SmackDown for one week to make way for baseball coverage and moved the show to FS1. In doing so, they knew they would lose viewers but still expected to draw somewhere between 1.5 and 2 million viewers for the slot. They got a horrible surprise when the ratings came in. Smackdown drew less than 900,000 viewers in total. That’s the lowest number it’s ever drawn on any network in its entire twenty-year history. There’s no way to dress that up as anything other than a disaster, and there will be executives at FOX looking at that number and raising their eyebrows.

It’s tempting to write off the downward shift as a consequence of the show being moved from its usual channel, but the real picture is that ratings have been sliding since the week the show made its debut. For its first-ever show on FOX, which the company and the network both threw everything at in terms of promotion and star power, SmackDown drew a respectable audience of 3.8m. The drop-off between week one and week two was one million. By the following week, a further four hundred thousand people had tuned out. Even if we look at the FS1 rating as an anomaly, this supposedly-hot wrestling show has lost 1.4m viewers in the space of just three weeks.

There are several reasons why this might be happening, and one of them is that WWE just doesn’t hold all the keys to the castle anymore. For decades they’ve been the only major wrestling promotion in the USA, but this year that changed. The TNT-backed company All Elite Wrestling went live on television almost exactly at the same time SmackDown moved to TNT and has been able to hold and maintain an audience. Perhaps more crucially than anything else, it’s holding and maintaining people in the key 18-49 demographic with far more success than anything WWE is doing – and that could be hurting the older company. All Elite Wrestling didn’t just decimate NXT in head-to-head ratings on Wednesday last week – it also had more viewers than SmackDown.

Competition can sometimes be healthy for business – and it certainly was when WWE and WCW went up against each other in the so-called ‘Monday Night Wars’ twenty years ago – but it seems that’s no longer the case. Metaphorically speaking, Vince McMahon has owned the pro-wrestling casino for a long time now. It didn’t matter which mobile slots games people chose to spend their money on inside that casino, because they all belonged to him. Ultimately, every dollar spent on those mobile slots was WWE money, and they could, therefore, stand to lose a little every now and then. Now someone else is also offering mobile slots on website like RoseSlots.com, and their mobile slots seem to be a little more exciting and inviting than what McMahon has to offer. The monopoly is gone, and it looks like many of the people who used to play with WWE have decided to go and play elsewhere.

There’s also a distinct lack of innovation and originality with the product WWE is presenting. If you were one of the few people who did tune into the show last Friday, you’d have seen a show dominated by Ric Flair and Hulk Hogan. There’s no disputing their status as legendary names within the wrestling business, but their time had already come and gone ten years ago. Their peak years were somewhere between ten and twenty years before even that.

Other people should be there to pick up the baton from Hogan and Flair, but the show doesn’t have the star power to persuade people to tune in like it used to. Dwayne Johnson and John Cena are away in Hollywood making movies. Ronda Rousey is taking some time away from the ring. Roman Reigns, who the company has invested into heavily in an attempt to make him the next breakout star, has never caught on with a mainstream audience. Even Brock Lesnar, who was once a bankable box office star, is suffering from the law of diminishing returns every time he comes back. WWE has failed badly at creating new stars, and because of that, it’s been forced to return to the well of the past time after time. It now seems that the well is beginning to run dry.

There are clearly still millions of wrestling fans still out there – the first-week rating for the show proved that. They just want to be given a reason to tune in week after week, and whatever SmackDown is serving up for them right now isn’t doing that. It may still be too early to panic about if or when FOX might pull the plug, but the nosediving ratings should tell WWE they need to make dramatic creative changes to their output. This big question is whether Vince McMahon, at 74 years old, is still in tune with the audience enough to give them what they want.

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About the Author

Dr. Jerry Doby Editor-in-Chief of The Hype Magazine, Media and SEO Consultant, Journalist, Ph.D. and retired combat vet. 2023 recipient of The President's Lifetime Achievement Award. Partner at THM Media Group. Member of the U.S. Department of Arts and Culture, the United States Press Agency and ForbesBLK.