MLW's Court Bauer touts 'huge year' for company amid media deals, splash moves

Major League Wrestling’s (MLW) business picked up in a major way in 2026.

The pro wrestling promotion picked up two media rights deals with Veeps and Tubi allowing its flagship show, "Fusion," to be aired on more platforms outside of YouTube. The roster also saw a reshaping with big names like Shotzi Blackheart, Tessa Blanchard, Masha Slamovich, Trevor Lee and others entering the MLW ring at points during the year.

MLW owner Court Bauer acknowledged a new front office allowed the company to focus on growing the company in an interview with FOX Business.

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"It was a huge year for us," he said. "We built out our new front office which allowed me then the bandwidth to go out there and do a lot of these deals. You have great people in your department, so you can then focus on your task at hand, which is to grow the company, build it, keep that momentum going, throw more wood in that fire and just let it build, let it build. And so that's been huge for us. 

"Tubi was huge because one of the things is, ‘Oh yeah, MLW, it's where MJF, it's where (Jacob) Fatu, it's where all these guys came from. I don't know about them, what's up?’ It's eyes and awareness. And so the goal, the task at hand was get a media rights deal. Get a deal and partners that can broaden your awareness, that can get you in those places and we did that with Live Nation and Veeps. They're the biggest owners of arenas in the world and their pipelines when it comes to Ticketmaster when it comes to the Veeps for their premium service for streaming events, and then Tubi, which, you know, has 100 million users per month and is bigger than Paramount Plus and HBO Max combined. So, that's a pretty good way to kick that off. That was, pretty transformative for us and then, of course, MLW on Amazon Prime, another great destination to find MLW content and continue to build out things like our YouTube and make sure that the fans know it's like, hey, as the economy kind of goes like this, it's important to know that you can access affordable content and get high quality at the same time."

Bauer suggested that the way he looked at the MLW roster was to harken back to a time when fans felt like there was real danger in the ring or when pro wrestling characters could really present themselves as evildoers.

Right now, the MLW roster includes top names like Killer Kross, Matt Riddle, Donovan Dijak, Austin Aries, Karl Anderson and Doc Gallows, super heavyweights like Big Damo, Jumbo and Brick Savage and guys who can bounce off the rope and fly high like Diego Hill, Titán, Black Tiger and Trevor Lee to name a few.

"I think it's important to have that so you're not just all of a sudden you look around and the product all looks like dudes that are underwear models, which is like, OK, what, what do we do with this? You got a lot of clones now," Bauer said of the balanced roster.

Notably, unlike weekly programming the casual fan might carve out two hours for, MLW keeps "Fusion" to about an hour barring a special episode.

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Bauer told FOX Business there was a strategy behind it.

"One hour, man. I think the sweet spot is like 60-90 minutes in total run time. And that’s something I remember talking with Vince (McMahon) about. He would agree at the time. It's like the perfect sweet spot is 90 (minutes). Sixty is great because you're really packed, man. You're making editorial decisions like I can't get that in this episode. I gotta wait. The nice thing about Tubi is we can be 42 minutes, we can be an hour and 5 minutes. We have that range of flexibility, but I think that's the difference because now you're not laboring to get to that two-hour mark, 120 minutes. 

"When you think about today's fans, not the old school fans, not the fans that are now like my age and older, but like new era fans, like, man, they're watching some on TikTok, on YouTube, on Instagram, they're watching for like 2-3 minutes. They're not sitting there watching, you a two-hour ‘SportsCenter,’ even an hour of ‘SportsCenter’ like I did when I was a kid. Like that was a big thing to make sure you got your ‘SportsCenter’ time and it's a different era. So, you gotta give them something that they can't turn off. It's harder to do it when you do two hours, really hard to do it when you have three hours. You can only stunt promote with a two- or three-hour show so much. ‘Hey, we have this celebrity, hey, we got this legend, hey, we're theming out that episode.’ You got 52 weeks to service. That is a lot to ask. So for us it's just packing that in and, you know, all gas, no brakes."

MLW will hold Saturday Night SuperFight at Cicero Stadium in Chicago this weekend, which will be huge for the company.

The card includes:

• Killer Kross (c) vs. Josh Bishop for the MLW World Heavyweight Championship in a Last Man Standing match.
• Yota Tsuji vs. Trevor Lee.
• Austin Aries (c) vs. Matt Riddle for the MLW National Openweight Championship.
• The Good Brothers (c) vs. Glasgow Boys on Top for the MLW Tag Team Championship.
• Tessa Blanchard vs. Keyra.
• Templario and Titán vs. Black Tiger and Ultimo Guerrero.
• Zamaya vs. Masha.
• An appearance from Místico.

As for 2027, Bauer told FOX Business he’s looking for the company to continue to grow its promotion and look for licensing deals that make sense for the company.

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"I think the more we get noisy, rowdy, and be kind of like what we are, the better off we'll be. But also continuing to develop and expand that roster. We have 52 weeks we have to provide to Tubi, so it's like, you know, we're looking at getting more and more aggressive in the free-agent market when it comes to bringing in talent and some of that's coming from New Japan, maybe it's coming from Stardom, maybe it's coming from CMLL as well. So, we have the free agent market and then we can also rely on our partners to supply us with excellent world-class talent. Between those two things it's a nice combo."