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Gail Kim is excited about the new era of TNA Wrestling.
IMPACT Wrestling is no more, as TNA Wrestling has returned. News of the company’s rebrand was first announced at October’s Bound For Glory event. The TNA Wrestling name was then officially brought back at the Hard To Kill pay-per-view on January 13.
TNA producer Gail Kim recently spoke with WrestleZone Managing Editor Bill Pritchard about the transition into this new era, highlighting some of the things that fans can expect to see from TNA Wrestling moving forward.
“For us, we’ve always just been on, the way I look at it, this consistently slow climb of progress, meeting our goals, of just having people tune back in because we kind of lost a lot of people throughout the years. And I think just a little bit of negativity because we’ve had so many different regimes go through. I think the last couple of years have been just these slow, steady steps of improvement where people see that our product is a great wrestling product. I think we have a great team now,” Kim said.
Gail Kim has seen a lot in her time with TNA, with plenty of ups and downs along the way. However, she can’t recall a time that morale has been higher than right now.
“The excitement of working together so that people can see that we’re just a great wrestling product, I think a lot of people are seeing that. The last couple of years, people have been just so positive, leading going into Hard To Kill, the buzz was just all positive. I didn’t see any negativity. People were flying into Vegas to see this event and it was everything we imagined it to be.”
An ‘Emotional’ Hard To Kill Event
Since IMPACT/TNA Wrestling began operating under the direction of Scott D’Amore, Kim believes the product has delivered compelling content in the areas of storytelling, story angles, character development, and in-ring action. Looking back on their most recent PPV event, Hard To Kill, Kim revealed that she had become very emotional about it.
“To my husband, the next day, I started getting emotional about [Hard To Kill]. He always makes fun of me because I never cried at our wedding. He goes, ‘You cry for wrestling, and you didn’t even cry at our own wedding.’ And so the next day I talked to him and he goes, ‘So, it went well? And I said, ‘Yeah,’ and I just started almost like getting emotional. I said, ‘Okay, why am I feeling like this the next morning in the gym working out?'”
“I’m just so excited for the future and what’s to come,” Kim said. “The momentum has been great. We’ve injected new, fresh talent into our company that I think everyone is excited for, from fans to our own roster, our company, I think they’re going to have a magical ride.”
What’s Old Can Be New Again
As Kim now looks toward the future, she was asked to identify a staple of the previous TNA era that she would like to see potentially woven into current programming. In response, Kim suggested the idea of bringing back the TNA Lockdown event on a quinquennial basis.
“I know as a talent, after a couple of years, I did not like Lockdown because it was very limiting year after year for all the matches to be in a cage and to be different, but I wouldn’t mind seeing it come back,” Kim said. “Maybe not annually, but maybe once every five years or something. Something really, truly special.”
“I think there is a group of fans that really loved it, and I know that the girls have. I never got to experience Ultimate X, Queen of the Mountain, but I think a lot of them have not experienced the steel cage match, which is kind of almost the basics of a gimmick match, as we call it. It’s something a little bit rare. I feel like I haven’t seen one in a little while.”
TNA is in Orlando on January 19 and 20 for two nights of television tapings. Watch our full interview with Gail Kim below:
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