According to a new report from Voices of Wrestling, IMPACT Wrestling appears to have found its new home, following a holding pattern stint on one of parent company Anthem Entertainment‘s other US networks, Pursuit. According to the report, the new home for IMPACT Wrestling is slated to be AXS-TV, the current home for New Japan Pro Wrestling (NJPW) in the US, as well as Women of Wrestling (WOW).
IMPACT Wrestling Heading to AXS-TV
IMPACT has been without a permanent home since it departed PopTV last year, landing in a temporary spot on Pursuit Channel, a smaller cable network that Anthem has ownership stakes in. But while it seemed a backward move, the location of Pursuit was never considered a long term or final destination for IMPACT.
The deal is still in final negotiations, but they appear to be now in the stages of finalizing which day of the week. According to the report, Wednesday was the originally suggested day of the week, although plans have changed due to All Elite Wrestling (AEW) looking to launch their own show, AEW Wednesday Night Dynamite, on the same day of the week.
At one point, it appeared that IMPACT was set to debut on AXS-TV by the end of the summer. The July TV tapings in Windsor, Ontario were set to be the debut tapings for IMPACT on AXS-TV, but due to some final negotiations that are still being worked out, it’s currently been postponed. “This isn’t simply IMPACT moving over to AXS, it’s a little more complicated than that,” Joe Lanza of VOW mentioned in the Patreon report. “There’s a bigger picture business deal being negotiated that has to go down before any of this can potentially happen, and that’s the current snag.”
“The original plan was for after Slammiversary, for IMPACT to air filler programming on Pursuit for a couple of weeks to buy themselves some time,” Lanza continued. “And then at the Windsor TV tapings on the 19th and 20th of July to tape the first TV for AXS. So this would have happened before the end of the summer. That’s out the window. None of this is finalized yet. It’s not dead, it’s still likely to happen, but there’s bigger dominos to fall before IMPACT can be moved to AXS.”
Due to the later debut now, IMPACT has had to add a new round of TV tapings on July 14 to fill the “filler programming” dates and link to the July Windsor tapings. Some people noticed that IMPACT was missing a TV taping between Slammiversary and Windsor, and this was the reason why. July 14 was originally slated to be a One Night Only with Destiny World Wrestling in Mississauga (near Toronto) called Fallout, but it now seems that will become IMPACT TV tapings instead.
You can listen to the entire Patreon report from Lanza at Voices of Wrestling’s Patreon site. Stay tuned to the Last Word on Pro Wrestling for more on this and other stories from around the world of wrestling, as they develop. You can always count on LWOPW to be on top of the major news in the wrestling world, as well as to provide you with analysis, previews, videos, interviews, and editorials on the wrestling world.
