Last night saw the one night return of the Wednesday Night War with WWE NXT airing on Wednesday for the first time since April 2021. Due to the CW Network airing coverage of the 2024 Presidential Election, the show was moved off of Tuesday night for this week only.
While NXT aired a special show outside of it's usual home at the WWE Performance Center airing from the former ECW Arena in Philadelphia and filled with nostalgia from the 90s indie promotion, Dynamite countered with what was pretty much a normal lineup. The smaller building and fired up crowd on NXT made for a stark contrast with the half empty building on Dynamite with a crowd not making much noise for most of the show.
NXT was up from last week, despite the time slot change, with 619,000 viewers and a 0.17 rating in the 18-49 demo. That's up 5.3% and 21.4% respectively. It's was NXT's best 18-49 number since October 15th.
Dynamite did a historically low number with a 0.16 rating in the key demo. That was tied for the second lowest number they've ever done, beating only the last head-to-head battle with NXT on Tuesday October 10th. It was tied for the lowest number ever in the regular time slot with the show on Juneteenth earlier this year. They averaged 523,000 total viewers, which was the second lowest the show has ever done on a Wednesday night.
While Dynamite did advertise four matches ahead of time, three of them were announced in the last 5 minutes of the show the previous Wednesday and were mentioned in passing while the main event was airing. Conversely, WWE spent the last three weeks advertising that last night's show would be on a different night and airing from the former ECW Arena and it was treated almost as a premium level event in terms of importance.
For whatever it's worth, fan response to the two shows was almost identical with NXT receiving a slightly higher rating of 7.14/10 on Cagematch as compared to 7.05/10 for Dynamite. The main events of both shows were nearly identical with the 10-woman tag on NXT averaging a 7.41 score and the tag team match featuring Konosuke Takeshita and Kyle Fletcher vs. Ricochet and Will Hobbs scoring a 7.40.
