Various: Wrestle Kingdom 17 Breaks NJPW Record & More, Nick Aldis on NWA Career, WOW TV Ratings

Jan 7, 2023

NJPW Wrestle Kingdom 17 News: New Japan World Viewership Record, Attendance Note,

New Japan Pro Wrestling recently announced that this past Wednesday’s Wrestle Kingdom 17 event in Tokyo, Japan broke the record for highest ever unique viewership for a NJPW event on their New Japan World streaming service in New Japan World history. It was announced that 92,409 unique viewers watched their event live on New Japan World with the split being around 28,000 for the English feed and around 64,000 for the Japanese feed.

NJPW also recently announced that tickets sales for this year’s Wrestle Kingdom 17 event was higher than the combined tickets sales for their two-night Wrestle Kingdom 16 events in 2022 and also their two-night Wrestle Kingdom 16 events in 2021.

In regards to the event’s paid attendance of 26,085, Dave Meltzer reported in this week’s Wrestling Observer Newsletter that Wrestle Kingdom 17 drew the highest attendance for a non-WWE event in the past three years for wrestling events around the world.

Meltzer reported that NJPW’s Wrestle Kingdom 17 event on January 4th generated a #11 ranking on Google for searches that day. Meltzer also reported that this was the first time ever that a Japanese wrestling event managed to rank in the Top 20 for searches for a day on Google. For some comparisons, Meltzer reported that the December 30th WWE SmackDown show featuring the very hyped up in-ring return of John Cena did not rank in the Top 20 for searches on Google that day.

Nick Aldis Comments on His Recent Career in NWA & Potential Third Match with Cody Rhodes in Future

A recent episode of the Universal Wrestling Podcast had Nick Aldis as the guest. One of the topics discussed included Aldis’ thoughts on his recent career in the NWA and his appreciation over being able to learn some behind-the-scenes aspects about the wrestling industry.

“Well let me say this, I take way more away from it that’s positive than I do negative (his experience with the NWA as a whole). Things changed in the last year and that’s unfortunate but it is what it is. But man, I learned a lot because essentially, it was a lot of the stuff that happened, happened just through sheer force of will on my part. I taught myself how to edit. I was making the packages for my matches with Trevor [Murdoch] and you know, my match with Mike Bennett… So I think what I take away from my time at the NWA more than anything is that I’ve learned how to orchestrate and engineer that (a good story) as a talent and a producer. Because I had to be all of those things at the NWA, right? I had to wear a lot of hats so it was like, Cody [Rhodes] was the best example of it, the angle with Cody and I because it was like, okay, the hard part is done in the sense of there’s an arena with 11,000 people waiting for us. So how do we build this anticipation? Because usually, you have to do all that stuff in order to sell the tickets but on that occasion, it sold the tickets so we were like, ‘Cool…’ I learned how to share ideas, I learned how to manage people because a lot of the time, younger talent would feel more comfortable coming to me with stuff than they would maybe going to management, and I would be a sort of conduit between the two. I learned how to be a leader, but I also learned how to accept that there are things that you can’t control. I learned so much from my time but, I guess for me, the thing I learned the most was really the booking process. Instead of just thinking of one particular idea… when you work for a company, you might, ‘Oh, I have this one idea.’ But instead, having the responsibility to go, well here’s how we could get there and here’s how we could implement it and here’s how we could execute it and here’s the resources we have. I can make that happen and I talk to a guy who can make this part happen and I can figure out a way to get to this. What it’s done is it’s just given me so much confidence that, again, if I were to have the opportunity to do anything with better resources, now I feel very confident that I could make something, make some magic.”

Aldis also gave his thoughts about his current status as a free agent.

“Obviously for me, the significance of the year rolling over is the fact that, yes, obviously I became a free agent which I’m pleased about and excited about but you know, truthfully, I feel like everyone else is making a bigger deal of that than I am. Because for me, it wasn’t necessarily a case of, oh, I can’t wait to go somewhere else. For me, it was just more a case of, my time here is done. It probably should have been done a year ago, you know? (he laughed) But I decided to give it one more year and this time around, I went, no, it’s definitely time for me to move on and explore new opportunities… Things in this business, it’s like anything, you reach the point where you know in your gut you’ve done everything you can do and for me, that’s a big thing. I mean, I reached the same conclusion at TNA.”

Aldis also gave his thoughts about the potential of a third match with Cody Rhodes in the future.

“And I think that once we had the match (Aldis vs. Cody Rhodes at ALL IN) and then we knew that the Nashville match (NWA 70th Anniversary Show), I had some conversation with Cody about like, ‘Do you think we could do a trilogy?’… From what I recall, I just remember sort of throwing it out there like, ‘What if… it’s a Broadway in Nashville and then we do number three in London’ and it was kind of like (Aldis smiled) … We were excited about that.”

Transcript h/t: PostWrestling.com 1 & 2