As we noted earlier this week, Impact Wrestling has officially acquired Jeff Jarrett’s Global Force Wrestling, and according to The Tennessean, TNA Wrestling has plans to rebrand itself as GFW.
The report notes that the Thursday night show on POP TV will continue to be called Impact, however in order to distance itself from the old TNA name and the legal drama and financial issues the company had, parent company Anthem Sports will be rebranding TNA Wrestling as GFW, and Jeff Jarrett remain the creative head of Impact.
GFW will have its headquarters located at Skywalk Studios, and the company is using Slammiversary on Sunday as a relaunch, so-to-speak, of the company. Jeff Jarrett had the following to say on the move:
“We’re a global brand. We have partnerships in Mexico, Japan, other places. Collectively coming together, we’ve combined forces and basically the rebrand final touches happen (on Sunday) at ‘Slammiversary.'”
Anthem’s Ed Nordholm added that the double meaning of TNA, which stands for Total Nonstop Action but also has a sexual connotation, was a turn off for many potential marketing partners. Nordholm also said the company is working on developing a streaming OnDemand service to access the vast Impact tape library. Nordholm had the following to say:
“When Anthem got involved we saw a rare opportunity to get involved with an asset that already had global distribution. It’s a 3,500-hour library, broadcast in 120 countries, existing distribution contracts in India, Africa and now the United Kingdom. The timeline to take a ground zero promotion to that kind of penetration was 15 years. The work now is to fix some things.”