Ninja Warrior will beat Seven’s Spartan, despite ‘undeniable similarities’ in promos, Nine programming boss claims
Nine has come out swinging against competitor Seven, declaring its highly successful Australian Ninja Warrior franchise will easily beat Seven’s alternative offering Spartan.
Nine’s programming director Hamish Turner told Mumbrella: “[Seven is] obviously keen to emulate [the success of] Ninja, but you have to question where the line of appropriation and imitation is.”
Warrior versus Spartan: Nine and Seven’s competing franchises
Nine is clearly in the lead now with Seven getting increasingly desperate. It’s going to be a long, tough few years for the poor folks at there as they struggle to comes to terms with lower audience shares, lower revenue shares, decreasing market size and higher costs. Ouch.
Spartan is a better looking product than Ninja and being a team competition should make for better stories, better TV and therefore ratings.
Last year’s Ninja was a fraud and broke the trust of it’s audience. It got boring watching sacrificial chumps falling in the water all the time. How can you string people along for god knows how long and not get a winner!
After beating it to death to try and re-coup the massive investment with 3-5 eps per week last year, Nine need to talk this year up to try and sell ads at inflated rates. They owe tarps all over town on a disappointing cricket season and Married doing 900K will be costing them make goods as well. Ninja is their big hope to gain ground on Seven for 2018.
However with big shows and events for Q1 and Q2, (MKR, Comm Games, House Rules) Seven will own the first half and get a major jump on Nine. It will be catch up for Nine once again. Seven wont make the same mistakes it did last year and give Ninja or the Block clean air.
Nine would be crazy putting Ninja in anywhere before Q3.
I must say Ninja was a very enjoyable watch…..and I, for one, am looking forward to its return. Advertisers will support it as it delivered last year….the question is will it grow?
Ahhhh bless.
Spartan is all about team work and has multiple competing people on a course – if anything it’s more like It’s a Knock out. Ninja Warrior is a copy off the Netflix series Beast Master.
Sasuke (the original Ninja warrior show from Japan) started in 1997 – way before Netflix existed.
America didn’t get someone to finish the ninja warrior course for 7 seasons…. the whole point is it is supposed to be so hard only the best of the best can finish it.
There was a winner. The person who got the furthest in the last round.