Impact Wrestling Set To Re-Brand As GFW

We noted earlier in the week that Impact Wrestling has officially acquired Jeff Jarrett's Global Force Wrestling promotion. The Tennessean reported today that Impact is re-branding as GFW.

The Tennessean reports that the acquisition is designed to distance the company from the financial struggles and legal drama that has followed the brand. The story is that Impact parent company Anthem Sports will re-brand as GFW and Jarrett will take over the creative aspects of the promotion. The Thursday night show on POP TV will continue to be called Impact.

Sunday's Slammiversary event is being seen as the re-launch of the company's pay-per-view business. GFW will be headquartered at Skyway Studios in Nashville, where they currently do pre and post-production work.

"We're a global brand," Jarrett said of the re-branding. "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 told The Tennessean that the company is developing an on-demand streaming service to tap into the valuable tape library they have. Nordholm also said the re-branding was done for two reasons – the double meaning of "TNA" was a turnoff for some potential marketing partners and the name was tainted because of negative media coverage.

"When Anthem got involved we saw a rare opportunity to get involved with an asset that already had global distribution," Nordholm said. "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."