AEW WrestleDream 2024

[Devon Malcolm]

I ended up watching the first three matches but couldn't be arsed with the rest.

Page vs White was fine, I guess, even though nobody gives a shit about the latter. Surprised at the result but really enjoyed an actual wrestling match in 2024 that didn't feature several hundred finisher kickouts.

Same for Mariah May and Willow Nightingale. That being said, Willow being in a world title match should be a big deal and it didn't feel like one. The match justified my feelings on it, it was superb and they have great chemistry. But being beaten clean? Yeah that doesn't work for me, brother. She's being absolutely wasted.

I think I realised I'd had enough when I had to endure a Jungle Boy match. I'm sorry but he's fucking crap and he's no good at anything. Never knowingly seen Shibata before and I don't really want to again. He looks like the part and his stuff is good but that no-selling shit can piss right off. The ending made him look stupid. Then Daniel Garcia came back and that cheered me up - but then so did MJF and Adam Cole. Every silver lining has two clouds or something.

Then I saw Ricochet was on next and I put The Final Girls on instead. Cracking film. I can't even sit through a Ricochet match for Takeshita.

[d-d-d-dAz]

42 minutes ago, tiger_rick said:

I doubt anyone is too stupid for it (other than the knuckle-draggers who chanted "Thank you, Vince") because I watch it and I'm a fucking idiot. But there is clearly a massive element of people who either are too bad faith to recognise that it's just different to what they normally consume or are people who are so used to the WWE hitting them over the head with stuff that they just don't get it. Personally, I think it's obviously the first one. And I say that because whenever WWE do stuff that requires some effort, people are all over social media rejoicing like they've just cracked the enigma code.

I'm fine with it. People have said they're not watching WWE for 20 years, then watched it and moaned about it. Now people who don't watch AEW are picking at their product out of loyalty to "their" team. It's all pathetic but that's wrestling. 

The funny thing is, it's fucking easy to potshot AEW. Even fans do it all the time. The crowds are depressing. The stop/start pushes are frustrating. Unexplained absences are a nightmare. Putting ROH on mainstream TV is incredulous.

Picking on one of their strengths, that they make the wrestling matches count and they tell stories through the outcomes and the aftermath is the worst bad faith acting. 

I was speaking specifically about Scorchers copied tweets where people said specifically audiences were too stupid for AEW, or that it's storytelling is too subtle.

I like both companies, so it's not about that. They're two different angles on the same thing. But neither are particularly subtle or clever. They've both done some clever and subtle things, and they've both done stuff that's stupid and obvious.

But the idea that AEW is too smart for '75%' of their audience, actually does the company a disservice. It's insults the wrestlers and the bookers because I guarantee they're not actively trying to make a product only 25% of people will get or like.

It's the sort of thing people say when they get frustrated not enough people see the brilliance in what they like, so they lash out and call the audience stupid. It's daft.

It's a good product, with flaws like any other wrestling company throughout history, and some people are going to prefer it to others, some aren't, and some (me) are going to like it all as they've never really grown up and have more time on their hands than they like to admit.

[Guest]

It's obviously bad faith to say "AEW are just too clever for some people", but I do think that they reward investing in their product more than WWE do. They do, generally, beat you over the head less with stuff. The problem is that the way they do that makes it incredibly hard to get that same investment unless you're one of the sickos. Bryan Alvarez is consistently making this point, Tony Khan doesn't seem to get that most people are not like him, watching everything and remembering everything. The closer you are to being like Tony, the more invested in the product and the wider wrestling scene of the last 20 years, the more you'll enjoy AEW, for the most part. But if you're not one of those 12 people, a lot of the product is alienating to you. It's not that it's subtle (although it can be), it's that you need to be really invested to pick up on the story threads to notice stuff. 

That is, fundamentally, a big problem because the point of a television product is to attract viewers, but if you make the product need a bachelor's degree in the post-2000 indy scene, you're in trouble.

[tiger_rick]

22 minutes ago, d-d-d-dAz said:

But the idea that AEW is too smart for '75%' of their audience, actually does the company a disservice. It's insults the wrestlers and the bookers because I guarantee they're not actively trying to make a product only 25% of people will get or like.

No, they're not. But they always have been putting out a product that tells stories through wrestling and the commentary and not just through promos ad packages, features people interacting with multiple other peoples and feuds in a way that had been absolutely eliminated by Vince during the dead days pre-AEW and rewards people paying attention and recalling things that happened weeks, months or years ago. It's not overly complicated and I'm convinced it's only the BFA pretending otherwise. But sadly there are way too many people who see their shite through X and FB.

This argument isn't at all about people on here, most are good people who backup their opinions. So sorry if this is boring to follow.

 

18 minutes ago, Duke said:

That is, fundamentally, a big problem because the point of a television product is to attract viewers, but if you make the product need a bachelor's degree in the post-2000 indy scene, you're in trouble.

Their presentation was like this when their TV ratings were above a million most weeks and they were close to Raw in the demos. It's a misnomer. The difference is the stars they had, they freshness those people had, the matches and feuds we hadn't experienced yet and the consistency of which those people appeared and what they did.

They need to change plenty, but dumbing stories down, if that's a criticism, isn't one of them.

Edited October 14, 2024 by tiger_rick

[Sphinx]

Sorry to hijack the thread, but is there a highlights show of Dynamite? Now the days are getting shorter I'm looking to get back in the loop with wrestling. I've seen Sky show WWE highlights a couple days after their shows - was hoping for something like that, about 30 mins - 45 mins.

[BomberPat]

I don't think there's any truth to the idea that what AEW is doing is more "subtle" than how WWE do business per sé, but I agree with the underlying principle than when a lot of AEW's critics complain about "no story", it's because (as I talked about recently in another thread) WWE has taught them that "story" is the angles and the promos and the video packages and the backstage skits and, if you're lucky, the finishing stretch of a match, and the rest of the match is just something to get through on your way to the next point of the story. They see "story" and "wrestling match" as two distinct parts of the show, rather than the matches being the vehicle through which most of the story is communicated. The idea that AEW is full of subtle storytelling and things you have to be super-smart about to understand is nonsense, though, it's still just wrestling, it's not Pinter, it's panto in kickpads.
 

15 hours ago, HobowithaShotgun said:

This is just my random thought - but with the rumored Fox show, I wonder is there a likelihood that Mox takes the belt to the new show or something like that. He alludes to some kinda higher power too - maybe something with Shane McMahon.

I don't think there is any suggestion of a higher power at all, and I find it really bizarre that a lot of people have seen a Jon Moxley heel turn that he has explained pretty explicitly in multiple promos and asked themselves, "could this be about Shane McMahon?". 

As far as I can tell, it all comes down to two points - one was Mox's first appearance in this gimmick being to tell Tony Schiavone (or Tony Khan via Schiavone), "this isn't your company any more", which people took to mean some new authority figure coming in, rather than it far more sensibly meaning "Moxley wants to control AEW", and one instance of Excalibur on commentary asking, "who is forcing Jon Moxley to do this?". That was very obviously a rhetorical question - he's not saying that there's someone pulling Moxley's strings, he's saying that nobody is making Moxley behave the way he is, and all his talk of his actions being about something bigger than just him and Bryan are bullshit that he's using to justify being a horrible prick. I assume Excalibur must have noticed people taking that the wrong way, because at the PPV he very clearly said, "nobody is making Jon Moxley do this but Jon Moxley". 

There is no higher power, and that isn't the story they're telling. I'll eat my hat if it turns out to be otherwise.

You might be right about him taking the belt to another show, though I hope that's not where this is going, if only because they never got to finish whatever story they had in mind with CM Punk as the "Real World Champion" and they might be aiming for that story again here. I doubt it, though.

 

As for the show as a whole, I really enjoyed it, I thought every match delivered bar the Bucks and Jericho matches, and neither of them were offensively bad. A lot of it felt low stakes, in terms of the build, and a lot of the results feeling like foregone conclusions, but I wonder if some of that was intentional giving how extremely high stakes the main event and show closing angle were.

I didn't like the Kyle Fletcher or Wheeler Yuta turns. Fletcher has got really over as a babyface despite being paired with Don Callis, and I think officially setting him up as a face would have been a better move than the lateral or backwards step of having him "turn heel" while already having a heel manager. The money for me was in Ospreay, Fletcher, and Davis whenever he returns, breaking away as a group in opposition to the Callis Family, rather than an Ospreay/Fletcher programme. The weird part of Ospreay's stint with the Callis Family is that he spent half of it being booked against the Callis Family anyway, so there's nothing new in having him wrestle against Kyle and Takeshita, he's already done it. Good to see Takeshita win a title, though.

As for Yuta, what I'd hoped for was that he would refuse to help the BCC, but then walk out on Bryan all the same - become his own man, rather than just shifting his allegiance between mentor figures. Sticking with the BCC is just another lateral move, though there's at least some intrigue about why he's done it. 

 

I thought the finish to the main event was great. Bryan Danielson passing out, rather than being pinned or submitted, is the perfect final note for this story, because we've been told for months that his body is giving up on him, so that's how it had to end. Bryce Remsburg sold it brilliantly, the moment the bell rung he was in shock and disbelief, because he's just done his job, but in doing so has made the call that ended the career of his hero. If we're talking "subtle" and things that WWE would never do, then Bryce's involvement there fits the bill. 

The post-match angle was brutal and fantastic, and my only real criticism is the reuse of the plastic bag - it's less impactful to do it twice, though I get that they were going for a kind of narrative symmetry. The problem is that it's not something that they can establish as Moxley's signature way of attacking people, because they can't do it on TV, so it's not been done often enough to establish it as his "thing", but used too infrequently for doing it again to feel like anything more than a rehash. Especially given they were building to Pillmanizing Bryan's neck, I don't think it needed both.

Something that AEW is usually very bad at is allowing angles to sink in. Something will happen, and then immediately they cut away to the next segment to keep the show rolling. That they just allowed this segment to really breathe, and for the show to go off the air with everyone just not knowing what to do or how to recover from what they'd just seen, was brilliant. It was a downer ending, for sure, but it needed to be. I would have liked to have seen Nigel get involved - him stepping up to protect Bryan because even he thought they'd gone too far would have been the icing on the cake, and I thought that when Moxley knocked his headset off that would be a precursor to him getting involved.


The big question is how they follow it up, and that's something that AEW has historically not been good at. They've clearly set the stage for Darby Allin and Orange Cassidy as the next two title challengers, but Dynamite needs to still feel like a company reeling and in shock from this for it to work for me. It can't just be a normal episode of TV 90% of the time and then have one or two Jon Moxley segments to talk about this angle. The angle should overshadow everything on the show. 

If they get it wrong, this feels like a Wrestlemania 2001 moment, where they've created their new top heel by turning Jon Moxley, but they've done it as their top babyface is one foot out of the door, and there's no one there in a position to step up to fill Bryan Danielson's shoes. The risk is that Moxley now has to spend the next six months fighting the AEW equivalent of Undertaker, Kane, Jericho and Benoit - feuds with the people who are there to make the stars look good, not the stars themselves.

 

They're an extremely heel-heavy promotion right now. That would be great if they were serving as a heel factory for one or two top babyfaces, but they're not. They're just a company that has put every single title belt on a heel, and that necessarily diminishes the booking - one of the strengths of having multiple titles should be to distinguish how you book one from another; if you've got two singles titles, have one on a heel and one on a face. But they have eight titles, and all of them are on heels.

Outside of that, I don't think Darby Allin is anywhere near ready to win the World Title yet, so I don't think he's getting it any time soon. I wouldn't be surprised if he's the one to beat Moxley eventually, I don't think he wins it on the first or even the second attempt. And Orange Cassidy won't beat him - he'll be built up as a guy with an unlikely winning record over Mox, and then to take a heartbreaking loss in their eventual title match. Right now, they don't have a lot else in terms of viable top babyfaces title contenders, because those guys are busy elsewhere - Will Ospreay is tied up with the Callis Family, Swerve has his angle with MVP, Adam Cole is with MJF, and that's really it for your main event picture, unless there's any chance of Adam Copeland, Kenny Omega, or Samoa Joe coming back any time soon to challenge for the belt, but Omega's natural return story is with The Elite, and Copeland's with Jack Perry.

Speaking of The Elite, that's the other wrinkle in all this - the story being set up is clearly about a war for the heart and soul of AEW. Jon Moxley was always the guy to rally the troops when things went wrong, to step up when somebody got hurt or CM Punk fucked up the plans, and to right the ship. That informs his current gimmick, where he sees himself as the heart of AEW, and sees what he's doing as a necessary evil to fix what he considers AEW's mistakes. Orange Cassidy and Darby Allin make perfect sense as the people to step up and challenge him on that as the other guys who, in very different ways, are dyed in the wool "restore the feeling" AEW diehards. But it's weird doing a "heel wants to save AEW from itself" story with the AEW babyfaces rallying against him to fight for a different vision of what AEW represents, while the main on-screen avatars of the company itself are The Elite, who are all heels.

[Guest]

13 minutes ago, tiger_rick said:

Their presentation was like this when their TV ratings were above a million most weeks and they were close to Raw in the demos. It's a misnomer. The difference is the stars they had, they freshness those people had, the matches and feuds we hadn't experienced yet and the consistency of which those people appeared and what they did.

They need to change plenty, but dumbing stories down, if that's a criticism, isn't one of them.

Yes, and I think that presentation is partly why their ratings have dwindled. In 2020 WWE was actively terrible and AEW was fresh so people were willing to give AEW more of a shot, but even then they had the problem of not explaining stuff they'd put on Being The Elite, of all things. Since then they've added 2 shows and WWE is producing stuff more people want to watch. People who haven't kept up have dropped off.

I don't think they need to dumb stories down, I think they need to make them more accessible to people who haven't kept up, and those two things don't have to be synonymous. Tony Khan seems to think they are, and that's a big part of the problem.

[BomberPat]

25 minutes ago, Duke said:

Bryan Alvarez is consistently making this point, Tony Khan doesn't seem to get that most people are not like him, watching everything and remembering everything. The closer you are to being like Tony, the more invested in the product and the wider wrestling scene of the last 20 years, the more you'll enjoy AEW, for the most part. But if you're not one of those 12 people, a lot of the product is alienating to you. It's not that it's subtle (although it can be), it's that you need to be really invested to pick up on the story threads to notice stuff. 

That is, fundamentally, a big problem because the point of a television product is to attract viewers, but if you make the product need a bachelor's degree in the post-2000 indy scene, you're in trouble.

I think this is massively overstated, to be honest. 

You don't need to follow all of that stuff to understand what's happening. You don't need to know any history of independent wrestling to follow what's going on, not least because it's very rarely actually relevant to anything that's happening in AEW, but mostly because, again, it's only wrestling. The vast majority of wrestlers in AEW are either goodies or they're baddies, and have pretty clear and obvious gimmicks or roles to play, because it's wrestling, there's no complex characterisations or grand narrative arcs here. 

Those of us who have been in the bubble and watched wrestling for decades know that this wider context exists, and get hung up on it. People watching for the first time just don't.
 

A friend of mine just went to her first ever wrestling show, and loved it. She watched Dynamite the next week because she wanted to watch more wrestling, and she loved it. The only broader context she has is that her husband watched a tiny bit of wrestling in the late '90s. She doesn't know anything about wrestling, doesn't know any of the characters or the stories, she just watched and enjoyed it on its own terms, because it's really not that difficult to follow. The broader historical context is window dressing, it's not The Story. 

There wasn't a single match at Wrestledream that required you to know anything more than the bare bones of it to make sense. Does knowing that Will Ospreay and Ricochet, or Darby Allin and Brody King, have history going back years in different promotions add to those matches? Yes, absolutely, and that's why commentary tells you about it. But it's window dressing. You don't need to know that, or to have seen any of those matches, for the story of this match to make sense to you. Because it's still just goodies and baddies wanting to win a wrestling match.

And because anyone watching for the first time knows they're watching for the first time. They're not idiots. Nobody tunes into a TV show six episodes into series seven and complains that they don't know who anyone is or why this person hates that person, because they recognise that there is context they've missed but that, generally, they can figure it out by watching the show, because we've watched TV before and know the conventions of storytelling. I didn't watch the WWF between around 1996 and late 2000, and was largely left to my own devices to figure out what was going on when I got back into it - some of it I got wrong (I assumed The Undertaker in 2000 couldn't possibly be the same guy from the early '90s, and must be another wrestler with the same name), but most of it I could figure out pretty quickly, at least as much as was necessary to enjoy the show. When the WWF trotted out some old wrestler I had never heard of and told me they were a legend, I didn't go "who the fuck is Ernie Ladd, how could I possibly know about him?", I figured, "oh, this guy must be an important old wrestler, because that's what the TV show is telling me". The only context you need is the context you are given, and everything else is a bonus.

 

We have a tendency to be too in the bubble, and too bogged down in the nitty-gritty of the hows and the whys of wrestling. Most people don't do that, it's just a TV show they watch. My friends watching AEW for the first time don't panic that they don't know who the Undisputed Kingdom are because they haven't watched years of ROH to understand their dynamic, they think "oh, this guy is a prick with two prick mates". Because that's all you need to know.

[Guest]

7 minutes ago, BomberPat said:

And because anyone watching for the first time knows they're watching for the first time. They're not idiots. Nobody tunes into a TV show six episodes into series seven and complains that they don't know who anyone is or why this person hates that person, because they recognise that there is context they've missed but that, generally, they can figure it out by watching the show, because we've watched TV before and know the conventions of storytelling. 

I think there's a significant difference between watching for the first time and trying to continue watching. You'll need to move from the "what's going on" to "why it's going on", and when that happens you often do need a lot of backstory in AEW matches. Hell, Derby and Brody was built on that backstory, where they at least tried to explain it in one crap segment. You can watch almost anything in a vacuum, there's a ceiling to everyone's investment, and the more effort you have to put in to understand, the lower that ceiling is.  This is why TV shows (who are usually only prioritising one or two stories at any given time) often have recap videos at the start of episodes. AEW does that a bit, but you fundamentally can't do it for every story they've got going on, because they'd have to have a one-hour show of video packages.

I also think, fundamentally, saying for most people "it's just a TV show they watch" is flawed because fewer and fewer people are watching it. I'm not saying it's the only reason, there's obviously a wider context, but I think it's clearly part of the problem.

[tiger_rick]

16 minutes ago, Duke said:

Yes, and I think that presentation is partly why their ratings have dwindled. In 2020 WWE was actively terrible and AEW was fresh so people were willing to give AEW more of a shot, but even then they had the problem of not explaining stuff they'd put on Being The Elite, of all things. Since then they've added 2 shows and WWE is producing stuff more people want to watch. People who haven't kept up have dropped off.

I think there are 4 reasons for the drop off:

1 - There's been another natural drop in TV numbers. Raw was down year on year for six quarters in a row until the current one, going back to early 2023. That's always just going to be ongoing, but is a very small drop.

2 - AEW appealed to people were falling out of love with wrestling or had already fallen out with it. Those people are still going to drop off eventually. I did. Partly because I hated Ric Flair being hired but I was already flaking. Over the last 20 years, I've just dropped it whenever my interest wanes. I think the audience AEW attracts contains a lot of those people. The audience WWE had left post-pandemic are the complete opposite. Fiercly loyal. We see that in everything about their fandom. It's great news for WWE.

3 - The product was so cold coming out of 2022. In a star-driven business, Rhodes and Punk leaving was big, the Bucks and Omega disappeared, Bryan was in and out with injuries, Omega got his serious injury, Hangman had time off, so did Moxley and MJF, Darby was supposed to go climb everest. Sting was always part time. Even down the card Miro, Lee, Copeland, Pac, Baker and Cole are just some of the people who'd been in and out. The freshness and vibrancy of the product was really hurt and I'm not sure it's ever recovered.

4 - They're not making new fans at the required rate. This is a big one. This might be where having a mature product hurts them. Sure, there are kids at the shows, often with Darby facepaint. They're are small number though. If WWE aren't actively pushing away fans, the only other avenue to making fans is attracting kids. That's difficult in a marketplace dominated by WWE. I'd imagine most kids who are AEW fans have parents who are fans too. Rather than the experience I suspect most of us had, which is that you become a fan and your parent can't really stand it but buys you the shit because you like it. This one is hard to solve without changing direction completely. 

All of that means decline in overall numbers is natural. They still have solid numbers, relatively, in the right demographics that advertisers want to be watching live TV, at a time when that is becoming less and less common, hence the rights deals, so changing completely is a risk that relies on some faith that there is a completely new audience out there who a) want to watch wrestling and b) are not completely satisfied with the alternative - and honestly, that isn't the case.

[Devon Malcolm]

48 minutes ago, BomberPat said:

Speaking of The Elite, that's the other wrinkle in all this - the story being set up is clearly about a war for the heart and soul of AEW. Jon Moxley was always the guy to rally the troops when things went wrong, to step up when somebody got hurt or CM Punk fucked up the plans, and to right the ship. That informs his current gimmick, where he sees himself as the heart of AEW, and sees what he's doing as a necessary evil to fix what he considers AEW's mistakes. Orange Cassidy and Darby Allin make perfect sense as the people to step up and challenge him on that as the other guys who, in very different ways, are dyed in the wool "restore the feeling" AEW diehards. But it's weird doing a "heel wants to save AEW from itself" story with the AEW babyfaces rallying against him to fight for a different vision of what AEW represents, while the main on-screen avatars of the company itself are The Elite, who are all heels.

Yeah, the whole thing is terribly written. The Elite have been dreadful in this angle and the whole thing has been short attention span theatre, so maybe they'll get shunted to one side or somehow repurposed as babyfaces, which would also be crap. This whole mess is easily my least favourite thing about AEW right now, and not just because some of the people at the centre of it would be high on my 'wrestlers I hate a lot' list. AEW continues, for me, to be mostly good wrestling matches and mostly awful or underwritten stories. It's disappointing they've learned nothing from the patience they showed with Toni Storm and Mariah May.

[Hannibal Scorch]

Just to add to @tiger_rick’s excellent posts today, they just doubled their TV rights for the next 3-5 years. Rating metrics that we see don’t seem great but they obviously have a lot of belief about what they are achieving at the moment. They do need to improve attendance on a weekly basis and there are definitely things they can improve but also other things they can’t help (like the non compete clauses) but if they continue to try and improve the product it should help things overall. It’s something all wrestling companies have gone through.

Fingers crossed @Devon Malcolm that they get RJ City to fill that Jimmy Jacob’s shaped hole in creative.

Edited October 14, 2024 by Hannibal Scorch

[Chris B]

53 minutes ago, Duke said:

Yes, and I think that presentation is partly why their ratings have dwindled. In 2020 WWE was actively terrible and AEW was fresh so people were willing to give AEW more of a shot, but even then they had the problem of not explaining stuff they'd put on Being The Elite, of all things.

I wrote a massive thread on twitter a few years back about the whole Hangman/Omega storyline (which I got a nice DM from Hangman about at the time), and I was honestly surprised. There'd been so much criticism about the storytelling being done through Being The Elite, but it really wasn't. Every major point happened on TV. There were occasional subtle back-up points, or reaction points on BTE, but I don't remember a storytelling beat that was.

I think that, because BTE was being filmed in the same area as a lot of the backstage stuff at the time (like the Dark Order hangout), people got mixed up in hindsight.

[air_raid]

59 minutes ago, BomberPat said:

If they get it wrong, this feels like a Wrestlemania 2001 moment, where they've created their new top heel by turning Jon Moxley, but they've done it as their top babyface is one foot out of the door, and there's no one there in a position to step up to fill Bryan Danielson's shoes. The risk is that Moxley now has to spend the next six months fighting the AEW equivalent of Undertaker, Kane, Jericho and Benoit - feuds with the people who are there to make the stars look good, not the stars themselves.

Fantastic analogy.

[Guest]

I just don't understand how you don't all realise that you wouldn't have cared at all about Danielson Vs Moxley if you didn't remember the smackdown segment from years ago where Dean Ambrose dressed up as The Mountie.