Court Bauer Says MLW Was In Talks With Paramount In 2025 Before UFC Deal Was Announced

Court Bauer reveals how MLW almost landed on Paramount.

In August 2025, the UFC and Paramount announced a historic deal that would put all UFC events, including the pay-per-views, on Paramount+ and available with a subscription and no extra charge.

Before UFC and Paramount struck a deal, MLW founder Court Bauer revealed to Garrett Gonzales and Dave Meltzer on Wrestling Observer Radio that MLW almost ended up on the platform.

“The company they were talking about last year at Paramount, prior to the Skydance acquisition, was MLW. The deal was going to be on the other side of the Skydance acquisition. It was going through the government to get cleared and blessed. We were told, ‘You’re on standby. This deal is getting done.’ So we had to wait. Those talks started around the time of our LA show; we met with them in April-ish of 2025. It moved fast, and we had the deal pretty much laid out; we were just waiting on standby through June and July. We had our people ready to go out there and make this thing happen. We were looking to start in the fall of 2025 and the staff would scale up because it was going to be live weekly. It was a pretty ambitious thing, and we were here for it.

“One of our guys got a golden bit parachute and was told he was not going to be continuing on with the deal post-merger, days before the deal was closed. On the other side, our other guy, Jesse Siskal, who just left Skydance for Redbird Capital, was one of the founding guys Ellison commented on that helped launch Skydance. He was one of the key guys shepherding us on his end. One morning we woke up to a Variety press release that said ‘UFC Deal (with Paramount).’ ‘Jesse, what’s going on?’ He’s like, ‘No one was aware of this deal. It happened at a very high level. That deal happened and strategies, I guess, shifted. We never had the contracts signed. I’m not going to bitch, it’s just another day in the business, but we were at the one-yard line.”

MLW is now on Tubi, VEEPS, YouTube, and other platforms.

Fans can learn more about the upcoming MLW Saturday Night SuperFight event on November 7 by clicking here.

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