In an interview with Fox Sports, NJPW President Harold Meij spoke about why Wrestle Kingdom will be two days in 2020 but not that way every other year. Here are highlights:
On Wrestle Kingdom 14 happening over two days: “Our shows, generally speaking, all sell out. Our product is very popular here in Japan. Because 2020 is an Olympic year, so there’ll be more global eyes on the sports and culture of Japan, we thought well, we’re part of the culture of Japan as well. Particularly for the night-life. It’s been said that Japan is very good for daytime tourism but not so much for night-life – there are restaurants and bars and that kind of thing, but not so much other types of entertainment. So even the government is saying let’s look at pro wrestling as a night-life alternative to just restaurants.
Because 2020 is an Olympic year, and because the demand for our product has been so great, that’s why we decided next year not to have just one Tokyo Dome day but two. The planning for that was more than a year before that – trying to get the venue obviously, but also deciding whether we want to do it, because it’s a risk for us as well. Can we suddenly double the number of people coming? We have to see how it goes, of course. Anything if you overdo it becomes stale. We want to keep the specialness of it, so I don’t foresee doing it every year – hopefully every so often, that would be wonderful, but we’ll have to see how the fans react the first time.”
On why NJPW of America will run smaller shows: “One of the biggest handicaps we have is the time difference. We can’t do a lot of live events on US prime time – if we do one at 6 or 7 o’clock at night, it’s 3 o’clock in the morning in the US, depending on where you are. You’re not going to wake up unless it’s a Wrestle Kingdom or something. Of course you can still do near-live or streaming, but one of the biggest things is we need to create the understanding of what New Japan stands for. The best way to do that is really like sampling. It’s a sampling marketing strategy. By doing smaller-scale shows in a lot of places, people can physically see what our product is like, come to love it and then join into the streaming service or watch the TV broadcast.”
On if NJPW of America will affect relationships with US promotions: “I actually think it complements a lot of the relationships that we have, especially with ROH for example. As we do these shows and more fans fall in love with our product, as we do more joint matches with ROH – whether ROH comes to us or we go to them – the value of the total package increases. They would see that our wrestlers are very good and so are the ROH ones.”