Scott D'Amore Talks Chris Jericho Supporting Impact Wrestling
As a wrestling free agent, Chris Jericho has flirted with seemingly every promotion out there. That includes Impact Wrestling who Jericho met with recently and then posted pictures of that meeting on his Instagram account.
Scott D'Amore, who is a co-EVP with Impact, discussed Jericho's dalliance with Impact and if it means fans could see him there in 2019.
"One thing Chris has proven in his very successful career is that you can't predict what he's going to do," D'Amore said on our WINCLY podcast. "Chris has been wonderfully supportive of myself, Don [Callis] and Impact Wrestling."
D'Amore then mentioned that Jericho had personally called Ed Nordholm and also live-tweeted many Impact events which shows his interest in the product.
"It's always great to have a guy at this level who's in your corner. If the stars ever align, who knows? I certainly can't promise he'll be there but can't rule it out so people are going to have to tune in on Pursuit [Channel] and all of our other great partners around the world, digitally, and see what 2019 holds," said D'Amore.
D'Amore mentioned Pursuit which is where Impact Wrestling's television show will be moving to in January. He then talked about what creative changes will be in store now that Impact now has a new home.
"One of the things you might see is that we're going to have a little more freedom to take the product in different areas that we haven't been able to take it so far," stated D'Amore. "POP TV has been very supportive, but they have a lot of restrictions on what can and can't be done on their network. Pursuit, while still being a channel that pursues family programming, they are a little more open to ideas as to what we can do content-wise."
D'Amore then compares Impact's pay-per-views to their television show and says you can see the difference.
"Now, will we ever go to the extremes that we go to on pay-per-view? Probably not, but that's what makes pay-per-view so special. But we can now explore other areas with our content, storylines and product that may not have been available to us previously," revealed D'Amore.
Along those lines of a new network and new content, D'Amore opened up about Impact not being afraid to push the envelope with their storylines.
"We always look for opportunities to tell stories in ways that they haven't been told before," said D'Amore. "In pro wrestling industry, there's so many angles and booking ideas that you start to see a lot of things that are a take-off of something you've seen before. So. we're always looking to find some new and different ways."
He cites the LAX and OGz feud as a different and intriguing storyline and also says the Undead Realm pushed them into the sci-fi genre.
"We're going to continue to look for things," said D'Amore. "If wrestling has a history of alternating between being almost G-rated and being risqué, sexually and violent-wise, we are always cognizant of the fact we have broadcast partners and a fan base that includes many demographics?
"There's going to be a lot of experimentation. We think that in 2018 we had more successes than failures, but we're going to continue to try new things. In a world where people are talking about things being stale and stagnant, we're trying to be different and we're going to continue to do that moving forward."
Wrestling Inc's full, exclusive interview with D'Amore can be heard as part of this week's WINCLY podcast. In it he talks more about Impact's move to Pursuit, how edgy the product intends to get, keeping their late-night time slot and more. Subscribe to Wrestling Inc Audio on iTunes to get every podcast from Wrestling Inc as soon as it's released. You can listen to the latest episode of the WINCLY in the embedded player below: