July 8, 2024 Observer Newsletter: AEW x NJPW Forbidden Door recap, WWE Money in the Bank weekend preview

By Dave Meltzer
Published: 5 Jul 2024, 05:42

Image: AEW

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Last Sunday’s AEW x NJPW Forbidden Door on 6/30 at the UBS Arena felt like part of a familiar pattern.

Ratings and attendance are low. The PPV comes, and the company does a strong show, the crowd is lively, it’s well received, and you often think maybe this could be the start of positive momentum. Certainly Revolution and Dynasty came across that way, and Forbidden Door fit into that pattern.

The repeated strong PPV shows, which do well from a business standpoint and crowd reaction standpoint, leave one thinking the product is really good and perhaps there will be a turnaround because of it. If there’s a lesson learned is that perhaps these strong AEW PPV shows is what may have kept the PPV end of the business strong when other aspects showed decline. But over the last year, the strong shows, perhaps even All In, the biggest success by far in company history, haven’t moved the others aspects of the business.

But there is no way to downplay the live arena success of the show. Forbidden Door had a long show with a generally hot crowd, which was explosive during the main event. It did a $1 million gate in the New York market, at the UBS Arena in Long Island. It’s a market they run all the time, and did this gate even though they just ran a PPV in that market only six months ago and WWE ran Madison Square Garden with great success two days earlier with an angle that led to a ton of talk.

But from a PPV standpoint, it’s definitely a question.