The former wrestlers and bookers with podcasts are falling over themselves with hot taeks on how the June AEW-New Japan supershow won’t do anything to build AEW’s audience.
Yeah, so?
The criticism is that the only people who will be interested in the supershow are those who are already AEW fans, which, OK.
AEW is giving its fans a gift.
And this is bad. Because it’s not going to grow the audience.
If this is the best you’ve got …
It’s not an automatic that a series of AEW-NJPW dream matches aren’t going to appeal to a wider base of wrestling fans, first thing.
If the booking gives us Kazuchika Okada vs. CM Punk or Tetsuya Naito vs. Bryan Danielson, there’d be sufficient buzz, which guarantees nothing, sure, but buzz is all you can ever hope for.
This is the right kind of buzz, at least.
There are still millions of lapsed wrestling fans from the Monday Night Wars era that both AEW and WWE would love to be able to tap into.
I don’t know that I’d say WWE is doing a great job doing anything to try to get those folks back with its continued devolution into being sports entertainment.
WWE spends so much of its time trying to grow its audience by booking guys like Jake Paul, Bad Bunny, Johnny Knoxville, which the hot taekers would otherwise denigrate as hot-shotting if another promotion were to, I dunno, book Shaquille O’Neal for a mixed tag.
Hot-shotting is a one-off, when the lapsed fans should be one target, and then making your current fans happy should be a regular thing.
The base for AEW doesn’t want to see a celebrity who’s trained for a few weeks do a couple of moves to get a cheap headline on ESPN.com or quick video clip on TMZ.
And the lapsed fans who left because of 20 years of WWE insulting their intelligence with celebrity nonsense, scripted promos, fake weddings, matches that seem to get in the way of the circus going on, might actually want to tune in to a night of actual good wrestling.
If the worst thing we get out of the AEW-New Japan supershow is that, a night of good wrestling, there are worse things.
Story by Chris Graham
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