WWE Monday Night Raw will remain under the NBCUniversal umbrella, according to Mattew Belloni from The Hollywood Reporter. Presumably, that would mean that Raw would stay on the USA Network but it’s possible that they could move to one of their other networks. Belloni also said that the deal to keep Raw was for 3-times their current value so WWE management must be thrilled with that.

Smackdown Live is not part of the deal and that show will go to open bidding, meaning that it will likely be picked up by another network. FOX is said to be among the networks interested in WWE programming so the show could land there.

It’s not clear yet when WWE expects to strike a deal for Smackdown Live and it’s not clear if this new deal with NBCUniversal would keep Raw at 3 hours or back to 2 hours. Vince McMahon has always said that he would prefer the show to be shorter than 3 hours (preferably 90 minutes) but they extended to 3 hours at the request of the USA Network. We’ll see if that changes in the fall of 2019 when the new TV deal kicks in.

This is a huge story and we’ll post updates when they become available.

Interesting tidbit among all the TV news today: NBCU is letting WWE SMACKDOWN go to open bidding. They're keeping RAW but the deal is so big (3x current value, I'm told) that they're not re-signing both. Big sports opportunity for another network. — Matthew Belloni (@THRMattBelloni) May 16, 2018











