The WWE will tag team with Iconic Events Releasing to distribute the pro wrestling outfit’s Aug. 21 SummerSlam pay-per-view event to select movie theaters.

The annual wrestling event will be showcased live in hundreds of theaters around the country, according to WWE. The event, which will be held in Las Vegas in front of a full capacity crowd, will also be streamed on Peacock and made available through traditional pay-per-view providers.

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Last year’s SummerSlam was held in the WWE’s Florida-based ThunderDome without live fans. 

“Iconic has a stellar track record of bringing people together to experience live events in a unique manner,” WWE SVP Global Strategy & Business Development Melody Yam said in a statement. “We’re excited to partner with their team to deliver to the WWE Universe a new way to watch our biggest event of the summer live on the big screen.” 

Added Iconic CEO Steve Bunnell: “SummerSlam is a marquee event that demands to be seen on the big screen, with big sound, in an auditorium full of excited fans.”

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World Wrestling Entertainment will lean on social media and pay-per-view promotion to help pin down viewers for its Aug. 23 WWE SummerSlam event, its second-biggest pay-per-view event of the year after Wrestlemania.

WWE will also expand the live on-air hours for SummerSlam — which airs on the over-the-top WWE Network, as well as via pay-per-view through cable distributors for a suggested retail price of $44.99 — to four hours to three hours to accommodate what it believes is a strong lineup of matches, Brian Flinn, WWE senior vice president of marketing and communications, told Multichannel News.

Additionally, a one-hour pre-show will lead up up the PPV telecast.

To promote SummerSlam, Flinn said, the WWE is placing heavy marketing emphasis on social media sites like Facebook, Snapchat and Twitter in an effort to activate its 525 million social media followers.

The wrestling outfit will exploit Facebook’s new “live” app to stream activities surrounding its WWE Superstars leading up to Sunday’s event, Flinn said. WWE will also offer Snapchat followers a live, ongoing narrative revolving around SummerSlam prior to to the live telecast.

“With these live look-ins, we are bringing fans from around the world into all of our events live leading up to SummerSlam,” Flinn said.

Flinn said the event would also receive traditional PPV marketing support from MVPD distributors — although he said satellite-TV providers DirecTV and Dish Network will not carry this event to their combined 34 million homes. Neither provider has aired a WWE PPV event since the company began airing its monthly PPV shows on WWE Network in early 2014.

To help draw viewers to the WWE Network, now in 1.2 million homes, the WWE in July began offering new users a rolling 30-day free trial regardless of when they signed up. Previously, the free trial had concluded at the end of each month regardless of when the signup occurred.

Flinn said SummerSlam, which will take place at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, N.Y., after a five-year run in Los Angeles, will feature as its main event a match between popular WWE superstars The Undertaker and former mixed-martial-arts star Brock Lesnar, which it hopes will draw both hard-core and casual wrestling fans.

“It always starts with the attraction, and this is event is the perfect example of us providing compelling content to our fans [that is] deserving of their passion,” he said.

The WWE will also develop several community-based activities in New York through out the week before the event, including an Aug. 21 interactive experience for fans to meet with and get autographs from WWE “Superstars.”

The WWE is hoping to expand the audience for its Aug. 17 SummerSlam pay-per-view event through the recent launch of its WWE Network over-the-top digital service to more than 170 countries around the globe, according to company officials.

The WWE Network, which currently has 700,000 U.S.-based subscribers, will benefit from the additional distribution which includes such countries as Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Singapore, Mexico, Spain and the Nordics, according to network officials. The company is hoping to generate 1 million subscribers for the OTT service -- which offers all 12 WWE PPV events as well as the company's vast programming library -- by the end of the year.

“Our decision to make the U.S.-based WWE Network available globally makes the whole proposition of the network scalable, so we’re very excited to make this available to 170 countries,” said chief revenue and marketing officer Michelle Wilson, although the company is not projecting the number of international subscribers it will sign up.

 “It gives us the ability to bring on new subscribers quicker than we were anticipating,” she added. “We continue to believe that the network will give us the opportunity to transform our business model.” 

Sunday's SummerSlam event, the company’s second biggest tentpole event after Wrestlemania, will market both the PPV version of the event as well as its appearance on the WWE Network.

Satellite services DirecTV and Dish Network however, will not carry the $44.95 SummerSlam event on a PPV basis, as both continue to disapprove of the WWE's carriage of PPV events on the WWE Network. In Demand will distribute the event to cable operators.

While PPV distributors have seen a decline in WWE PPV event buys since the WWE began telecasting its PPV events on the WWE Network beginning with April’s Wrestlemania event, Wilson said the WWE is still generating decent PPV numbers through the cable operators.

“We’re still generating a fair amount of PPV buys to the point where In Demand still wants to be in business with us,” she said. “We still think it makes good business sense to be in business with the cable operators.”

Wilson would not say how many international subscribers the WWE Network expects to generate for SummerSlam through the additional distribution.

The SummerSlam marketing plan will be backed by a multi-million dollar campaign that will feature ads on more than 20 major cable networks and digital advertising on a global basis with Google and Youtube for the first time, said Wilson. “We made a major investment around SummerSlam because we know the opportunity to bring in subscribers is much greater that it was in the past,” she said.