According to a report from Mike Johnson of PWInsider, WWE has officially purchased the EVOLVE promotion. There had been rumors for a while now that this could be happening and it is finally done.
Johnson has provided a lot of details about the sale. Here is what he wrote:
World Wrestling Entertainment has officially acquired ownership of the Gabe Sapolsky-Sal Hamaoui EVOLVE promotion, PWInsider.com has confirmed. EVOLVE has long been the flagship promotion of Hamaoui’s company, World Wrestling Network (WWN). The deal was closed after several months of negotiations. While there were rumors making the rounds that EVOLVE had been sold to WWE, nothing had been finalized until just recently.
WWE broadcast EVOLVE’s 10th Anniversary event live on the WWE Network (the first and to date, only non-WWE promotion to stream on that platform) in July of last year. They will have the complete rights to use the EVOLVE brand name and produce EVOLVE events going forward, whether as live events or WWE Network programming. There is no word whether we’ll ever see an EVOLVE event again, but certainly there will be EVOLVE/WWN content added to the WWE Network in some form down the line.
Johnson also says that several contracted EVOLVE wrestlers will be brought into the NXT system. WWE also now has the entire video library for EVOLVE and Dragon Gate USA:
The belief among those we have spoken to is that several contracted EVOLVE talents will be signed and enter the WWE NXT system as well. How many signings there will be has not been confirmed, but the expectation is that it will be at least four talents, possibly more. PWInsider.com has not confirmed any talents have signed as of this writing and we have been given no indication that the existing EVOLVE/WWN talent contracts are part of the sale.
The sale is believed to give WWE the entire EVOLVE and Dragon Gate USA video library. It is also believed some other content would have been sold to WWE as well, including the earliest era of Full Impact Pro, but how much of other material has not yet been confirmed as of this writing. We are told that material will be removed from WWNLive.com in about a month, so any material that disappears would likely have been sold to WWE. So, if you are a WWNLive subscriber, you have a chance to watch the material one last time before it goes into the WWE vault.
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