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WWE crews are working on moving production for television and pay-per-views to the 20,000 seat Amway Center, beginning with the August 21 episode of Friday Night SmackDown.
Although WWE has yet to announce the finalized plans, the company has entered a lease agreement with the Amway Center until October 30, and plans utilize interactive technology to bridge fans with the action happening inside the arena.
In March, WWE announced they would suspend live events and on-location broadcasts of RAW and Smackdown due to the ongoing health crisis. On March 13, SmackDown aired for the first time from the WWE Performance Center. The company has used that location as a closed set since.
In an interview with Wade Keller of Pro Wrestling Torch, former WWE producer and creative team member Chris DeJoseph reveals early meetings the company had on how to present television without an audience. DeJoseph was released from his position in the company this past June, and was involved in plans related to empty arena shows they began.
Several ideas were pitched, including cooking segments, office fights, live Twitter reactions, animated fans, cgi fans, hologram fans, and WWE legends coming in to do taped segments.
“There was talk of CGI fans and someone talked about hologram fans.”
“We don’t even know if we would be able to have wrestlers wrestle each other.” DeJoseph stated. “Are we going to do cooking segments? They asked all of us to run down a list of outside-of-the-box ideas of things that we could do.It was a huge compiled list. It was everything from have a big fight in the office to a cooking segment if we have to. Do we have everyone on Zoom from home? There were so many ideas because nobody knew what we were going to be able to do.”
One of the biggest obstacles was having fans being able to interact with the show, the company sent out a survey in March gauging interest in having live reactions recorded from viewers at home in lieu of a live audience.
DeJoseph spoke on wanting to have fans on the screen reacting to the show, but Vince McMahon felt it wasn’t worth the trouble, especially due to the fact WWE began pre-taping episodes.
“There was a lot of discussion about getting fans on screen watching the show and reacting,” DeJoseph said. “It started with Smackdown, and Fox had just tried it with a NASCAR race, and they didn’t feel it was worth doing. After going through all the trouble, they didn’t think the payoff really affected the show all that much. And you really can’t control what the audience reaction is. Also, eventually those shows we started doing in advance and it kind of became impossible to do something like that. There were also sorts of ideas, like live Twitter reactions,”
WWE would keep a close eye on how other properties were handling the absence of a live audience. A number of different suggestions were made including using a virtual billboard, augmented reality, and more big budget options like CGI or hologram fans.
“Everything was thrown against the wall,” he stated. “There was talk of animated fans. Nobody really knows what we’re doing here because it’s a whole new world. You’re watching other shows and seeing how they’re handling it. There was an idea – I threw an idea out there to have legends come on and do taped segments with them to add some newness to the show. We didn’t know if [the wrestlers would] even be allowed to wrestle each other at that point.”