Post by flame3169118 on Aug 25, 2021 4:44:36 GMT -5
Friday happened, this last Friday with C.M. Punk debuting for AEW which was insane right, insane. We all knew it was like this great big moment and it was like you felt good about being a pro wrestling fan and it was all of these great and wonderful things. Then it was like how many people actually watched and all those things and then the ratings came out, doing something like 1.1 million at you know here it would be nine, 10 pm eastern on a Friday night in the US is ungodly and they got an insane demo number, it's ridiculous what they did and the thing to remember and this is something with AEW that people kind of forget is that AEW has really, really high DVR numbers. People don't talk about it because it's not as important, but they have really high DVR numbers. People that are really into AEW if they don't watch it live they're definitely & they'll watch like the whole show, they're not just going to watch snippets of the show.
That's a big part of it and I think the big thing with the rating was that you have those die hard AEW fans that you know they weren't gonna miss this and the return of C.M. Punk and so we had arguably the biggest, not even arguably, it is the biggest night in AEW history. They got their second biggest rating only behind their debut and this is on basically the A- show I would say. It's still an A show, but it's more like an A- show because of the time slot. The fans didn't drop off a cliff after the C.M. Punk interview they pretty much stayed so it pretty much stayed over a million the entire time. I think it dipped under a million like once, but it pretty much stayed.
They had their biggest crowd to this point and they had their biggest merch gate which if you know anything about AEW that's a big freakin deal. Yeah it was their biggest crowd that's a big deal for AEW because AEW does really well with merch and then the C.M. Punk shirt in 3 days becomes the biggest seller in pro wrestling tees history which is insane when you think about like the Bullet Club shirts right and that shirt, his shirt outsold The Bullet Club shirts that's been around for years right, insanity. It was the hottest seller in 24 hours, it broke every wrestling tees record there is which is a feat in of itself. Pretty much everything about that show was a win. On top of the fact that in the 'main event ' you had Jon Moxley taking on Daniel Garcia and Daniel Garcia didn't win. It was a competitive squash for the most part, but Daniel Garcia looked good & he looked like a guy on the rise and you wanted to see more of him and that's one thing AEW is so good at is that making you want to see guys even when they lose you can see this is gonna be a guy, this is gonna be this. You can see it & it makes everything seem so much better because you can just see everything going on & you know they have the biggest night of their history & they still have Bryan Danielson to come & it looks like they're gonna have Adam Cole coming & blah blah. You know everything just seems to be lining up in crazy, crazy way.
And then you flip to the other side looking at SummerSlam. The Becky Lynch shit is insane to me. It is crazy to me that apparently she's going to be a heel as of right now. Now come Friday that might change. I am shocked it didn't change like Saturday, but it might change right now. They may because we'll see what the AEW rating will be on Wednesday but if let's say they get another what like, let's say they get 400,000 more people watching which is possible given what happened on Friday. Then they're going to be not that far from Raw in total not just in the demo and if they get that high they're going to beat Raw in the demo & it's even with coming off of SummerSlam. It's going to be crazy and then we get to Becky Lynch and it's like oh she's going to be a heel and apparently last time the last thing I saw & I don't know if this is true or not it apparently was her her idea that was tired of being a face. Which if she comes to me and she's like I don't really want to be a face anymore I'm like you're just coming back you don't want to be a face that's fine but let's wait until the Royal Rumble or WrestleMania. We can't be doing that now, you are without a doubt not just the most over woman, you are one of the most over people in the entire company and we can't be turning you heel, we just can't be doing that. That's pretty much what they did & not only that they made Bianca Belair look like a total goof on top of it which is like why would you do that. You looked like you were making a star even though they were kind of stalling out on her because they don't know what to do with people.
Unfortunately they don't know how to make stars because you have an old man who has a vision of what he thinks a star is & it's very evident of that given the fact that you know he refused to get behind C.M. Punk. It'll be interesting to see if a lot of these fans maybe not fans from like the Attitude Era, but fans that were fans five years ago right or seven years ago are like hey C.M. Punk's back now I'm coming back. If him leaving really him them hard because it was like he left, he was the chance, he was what we wanted & it's evident we're not gonna get what we want and then you had the whole Bryan Danielson thing and I think that became even a bigger deal I think that became just a bigger nail on the coffin and then when you look at like how everybody's used, how guys in NXT were used, the fact that NXT looks like it's going to be completely different now. It's really a tale of two companies and it's very very interesting to see.
We find ourselves at a crossroad once more just as in the past. The thing with WCW and people like to compare like when Nitro started and all this time, but what people forget is that when Nitro started WCW was still shitty. We were still in the Dungeon of Doom stuff was going on and we were getting lots of other things and then Hall & Nash show up and the things kind of changed at that point, but it wasn't this great and wondrous thing, it was still kind of bad & from the day that AEW really started it wasn't like that, it was like this is what the fans have wanted. We're gonna give the fans what they want instead of what everyone has been told you have to give them. We're gonna give them what they seem to want & we'll see how it goes. The interaction between AEW & the fans is very ECW like to a point that it is kind of scary. The thing is this is something that's been building for a long time.
Samoa Joe staying with NXT is kind of disappointing, but not for the reasons you may think. I really hope at some point he gets to go to AEW even if he doesn't wrestle just to show up because there needs to be recognition I think by AEW. I think AEW would do this because they seem like a company that would do this where you recognize that C.M. Punk, Bryan Danielson, Samoa Joe & Christopher Daniels that those four guys and you could add some other people to it, you could add Low-Ki & Homicide and you could add a few other people to it as well, but those four guys in particular really were the foundation to what built to allow AEW to exist. Without those four guys I don't think AEW exists I don't think we get the first indy boom which which led to the second indy boom which pretty much led to helping lead to the fact that we got what we got and then with AEW which led to New Japan becoming a big thing through The Young Bucks and then people latching on and then Kenny Omega and then you had Chris Jericho and then it kind of just goes from there.
I think Paul Heyman has kind of cast his die, but if Paul Heyman would ever show up in AEW it would be a massive moment because it would kind of be him showing up because if C.M. Punk is like the saint of everything that people don't like about WWE then Paul Heyman in a lot of ways is the god, is the guy right, him showing up, him giving his stamp of approval would be a complete geek out moment I think for most people and it's very much just listening to the fans & it feels great to me to see them doing so well because Saturday as well WWE announced they're going back to Saudi Arabia.
My thing is they don't have to go back to Saudi Arabia, I get the money's there, it's a lot of money all of this stuff, but they're not a business that has to deal with the Saudis. You help things through like free trade and sharing ideas, but that's the other part of free trade is there's a sharing of ideas, there's sharing of culture. You don't get that with the Saudis, it's you play by their rules or you don't play & because they have so much money then a lot of industries are just forced to play because they don't have a choice. WWE HAS a choice and then we're going to go through this whole thing again where maybe we'll have one women's match when they go we'll have like a Raw or Smackdown that is all the women and it'll be a woman heavy show, we probably won't get another ppv, but it'll be sad in a lot of ways & it's the first chance the got they went running back & it's just not ok. People will say whatever they want about the Khans & I absolutely understand that, but the fact that they let somebody on their tv show basically say 'screw the Saudis' that should tell you it is what it is.
The point of this is that AEW has picked up the torch of ECW that never went out. It was always there waiting for someone to pick up and run with it. TNA understood that, but was never able to do it. ROH never had the money and then when they had the money they didn't have the people that understood that that's what they needed to do & all of these things & it's a really cool time to be a fan. Hopefully when the world gets back to a semblance of normalcy which it looked like we were headed in that direction, but not quite, we will see something that is really really special.
You've got one company that absolutely listens to their fans, you have another company that basically looks at their fans like 'well we can listen to them, but we don't have to listen to them'
