Last week, WWE and Netflix announced a landmark deal between the two entertainment giants. Starting in 2025, Netflix US will be the exclusive home for WWE RAW, the longest-running televised wrestling program and WWE’s flagship show (sorry, SmackDown, we love you too). If you’re an international subscriber, this deal means that you get full access to the WWE suite — Raw, SmackDown, NXT — as well as the coveted WWE back catalogue and PPV events. All with just one Netflix subscription! That pays for itself after one single Wrestlemania.
“This deal is transformative,” said Mark Shapiro, TKO President and COO. “It marries the can’t-miss WWE product with Netflix’s extraordinary global reach and locks in significant and predictable economics for many years.”
Nothing Shapiro says in that quote is untrue. This deal is tremendous for the WWE, and it means great new things for Netflix as it continues to tiptoe towards more weekly appointment viewing. As mentioned, it’s also a huge boon to international fans! If you’re in the US, though — which is WWE’s primary market, by the way — your WWE access is about to get trickier in 2025.
RAW’s first-time departure from linear television comes with the unforeseen consequences of the ala carte era we all asked for after decades of paying too much for cable. You see, domestically, this landmark deal is for RAW and RAW alone. That means that if you want to access the full suite of what WWE has to offer, you’ll have to subscribe to the following come 2025 if you live in the United States:
- Netflix for RAW
- Cable or a cable replacement like Fubo for live access to SmackDown
- Peacock for NXT (currently, NXT moves to the CW Network October 2024), PPVs and back-catalogue access
- Maybe a third mystery product for Q4 of 2024?
Let me pause right quick and explain that last bullet. WWE’s existing deal with the USA Network — where RAW currently airs — expires in October of 2024. This is a whole three months before the deal with Netflix goes into effect. The easy answer would be to just stream on Peacock for the remainder of the year, but that’s not how their deal is currently set up. Right now, episodes of RAW don’t show up on Peacock until a month after they air on USA.
There’s also the question of what this means for episode length. Right now, RAW is a whopping three-hour program. One that we all know to be a bit of a mixed bag. But what we also know is that Netflix absolutely loves a long runtime. Currently, RAW’s already bloated episode length includes commercials, too. Netflix has entered its ad era, sure, but not to the same extent as traditional cable. Does this mean the show will get even longer with fewer commercials, or will see them lean into the freedom that comes with streaming and chop the timing down when it better serves the viewing experience?
Finally, there is the Peacock question. Based on what’s currently public about the deal between Netflix and WWE, the domestic rights purchased only include RAW. What happens to the wrestling giant’s massive back catalogue when Peacock’s deal expires in 2026? WWE only benefits from a potential bidding war between Peacock and Netflix, but should Peacock maintain domestic rights then that means subscribers are still stuck footing multiple bills to keep up with the wrestlers that they love. Beyond that still, does this change WWE’s weird draft premise? Will RAW become WWE’s more “mature” wrestling series now that it’s not on network television and Vince McMahon (bye.) is no longer around to enforce his weird “no blood” rule? There are a lot of big questions!
One thing that is not in question is that, for now, wrestling fans located in the United States got the short end of the stick on this “first of its kind” deal between WWE and Netflix. Here’s hoping some things get ironed out before RAW makes its final departure from network television. In the meantime, AEW puts on a great show and, at the time of publish, is easy to find!
Amelia is the entertainment Streaming Editor here at IGN. She's also a film and television critic who spends too much time talking about dinosaurs, superheroes, and folk horror. You can usually find her with her dog, Rogers. There may be cheeseburgers involved. Follow her across social @ThatWitchMia
