thecubsfan

They (re)mentioned Mundo/Mack but posted it at 5AM by mistake I guess. I'd think they announce the other match that's listed in the TV guide but not yet.

LU's choice was really going on break before this episode, or going on break after this episode (and all of this had been filmed months before they knew they were going to be put on a break.) I think they decided Matanza going to thru the ceiling and Dario kicking everyone out of the Temple was a more dramatic way to go on hiatus than having to wait for months to see the result of the title match. I find myself flipping back and forth on it. That episode they left on was anti-climax of an episode besides the Matanza/Dragon Azteca match, but this really wasn't better. It was an All Night Long match that turned out to be All Night Long Except For About Three Minutes So Dario Can Set Up The Rematch - and Dario only needs to set up the rematch because they ended the match early. (It was a very much "we're being dramatic, it doesn't have to make sense!" wrestling finish.) I'm willing to say whatever and be fine because we're getting the finish next week, but I think a lot of people would've been not thrilled about it if it was leading into a hiatus of uncertain length. I think a lot of people were probably not thrilled about it just now.

El Rey wants them back for a season 4 (and many more.) AAA wants back for a season 4. Most of the people on the show want back for a season 4. The problem is it's MGM and other investors are who are also paying for a big chunk of the show (likely the biggest chunk) and we have really no idea if they want to keep going or not. And it comes off like El Rey and AAA and everyone else don't really know either. You can read into what they've said positively, with them preferring to wait to announce Season 4 at a more impactful moment then in the middle of the hiatus, or see things like AAA partnering with Impact on US house shows as them moving to other strategies because they don't have faith in this one. It's open to interpretation and swayed by how your feel about how things are going, but I think either very few people know or no one knows. Cobb and Ricochet are in two different situations. Ricochet is a free agent if S3 had finished aired, which it would've done if it was on the original schedule. It hasn't, he's not and that isn't helpful for him. Cobb is under contract thru season 7 (we assume), so his frustration is the stagnation of the LU business. If it grows, great, he makes more money from it. If it dies, OK, he has a much better chance of going to WWE than he did before. If nothing happens, like nothing's happened this 2017, he's just losing time and doesn't have a lot left to lose.

May 31st is still the return date. The return episode will be the All Night Long full show with Johnny Mundo and the Mack. There's an over arching in ring storyline which begins the following week and lasts for the third quarter of the series, ending as they start ramping up to Ultima Lucha. Some of the stuff people have been complaining about here (and elsewhere) gets downplayed or the focus shifted away from for the last half of the season. I haven't seen most of it and I'm sure there are going to still be parts people don't like, but it reads like it's much better.

That show is actually ELITE's Lucha Azteca show. It doesn't make a whole lot of difference right now - it looks like they're repeating their one season again, so the CMLL guys will be on their for months before Things Happen - but they do a good job of making it easier to adjust for non-lucha fans. You'll get two singles matches each week, usually among big stars guys, and the first few weeks has some really great stuff.

MLW says season 1/2 on Netlifx (in "north america and parts of south america") on 02/15. Lucha Underground's social media says they'll be back with new episodes on 05/31.

The *good?* thing is this move also removes Univision and Unimas and that entire family of networks, so there are a going to be a lot of angry people and this shouldn't last too long.

El Rey is no closer to going belly up today than they were a month ago. The decision to split up the episodes was on El Rey's side. It's possible LU's ownership let them know they weren't going to be taping as soon as originally expected and that affected El Rey's decision, but otherwise the issues with LU aren't really connected to El Rey. LU won't have a slow decline. Here are the two most likely paths LU episodes return to airing this summer and air the full season 3, El Rey says they want Season 4, the other investors want to pay for Season 4, Season 4 is taped very late this year or early next year and things continue on normally until the next fork in the road. Everyone who was part of Season 3, whether they're still on good terms with AAA or quit or got fired, are still available to be used if the writers want to use them. LU episodes return to airing this summer and air the full season 3, El Rey says they want Season 4, but the investors aren't willing to put up enough money to keep it going, and no Netflix/movie/whatever deal gets done to bridge the gap. The 3 seasons taped continued to get sold internationally, but production on the show ends, and everyone is released from their contract. (And then there's quite a bit of a chaos with WWE eventually going after people who are now free agents.) It's going to be a sudden decline or rise either way - they're either going to have the money or they're not going to have the money by some deadline, and that'll decide things. It will be slow, because it's a long time before anyone has to make a decision and we might not get much info on which way it's leaning until that decision is made. (The silver lining to this break is it buys LU much more time to deals done to find some funding. The flip side is if they come back with the rest of Season 4 in June or August or whenever and the business status quo hasn't changed in anyway, we probably shouldn't be too attached to the future of the show. It's not just that it'd be nice for LU to be on Netflix, it's that LU probably needs to be on Netflix - and probably other less public deals too - just to survive. Every month they're not is ticking down the clock.)

Konnan doesn't know what he's talking about (or, at best, confused things or talked to someone who confused things) and Netflix isn't buying a wrestling promotion. The LU appearing on Netflix thing is - I don't want to say an outright lie, because that's too harsh and I'm sure someone in the power structure has tried and maybe even is trying - but it's clearly being used as a golden pot at the end of the rainbow to keep the spirit of the talent up at a trying time. It's gone out there every couple months since season one two years ago, but i feel like I'm the only person in the universe who notices this, and LU fans who are very excited about this very same story every couple months. You're not being dumb, but it is dumb we are still having conversation about Netflix. (And also Netflix as if would be a panacea - there are a lot of things LU could be fixing beyond getting on one digital VOD service, and those aren't happening either.)

WWE's trademarked Undertaker but not Enterrador.

Super Dragon got into season one of Lucha Underground and AAA broke into pieces a couple years later. PWG changed the business.

At least to start, they're airing the same episodes they aired in the Thanksgiving marathon: Next Week “Top of the Ladder” – Season 1 Episode 7 “A Unique Opportunity” – Season 1 Episode 8 01/25 “Aztec Warfare” – Season 1 Episode 9 “Grave Consequences – Season 1 Episode 19 probably following (though they're going to have to do something when the two hour episodes come up) “Trios Champions” – Season 1 Episode 24 “Fight to the Death” – Season 1 Episode 29 “All Night Long” – Season 1 Episode 32 “PenUltimaLucha” – Season 1 Episode 37 “Ultima Lucha Pt. 1” – Season 1 Episode 38 “Ultima Lucha Pt. 2” – Season 1 Episode 39 “A Much Darker Place” – Season 2 Episode 1 “Death Comes in Threes” – Season 2 Episode 7 “Life after Death” – Season 2 Episode 8 “Aztec Warefare 2” – Season 2 Episode 9 “Cage in a Cage” – Season 2 Episode 14 “No Mas” – Season 2 Episode 15 “The Contenders’ – Season 2 Episode 20 “Six to Survive” – Season 2 Episode 21 “Ultima Lucha Dos Pt. 1” – Season 2 Episode 24 “Ultima Lucha Dos Pt. 2” – Season 2 Episode 25 “Ultima Lucha Dos Pt. 3” – Season 2 Episode 26 “The Amulet” – Season 3 Episode 2 That'd take them early April, which doesn't appear to be Summer 2017.

Definitely. (Going at least 15 months between tapings hurts a lot with that too.) There's also no real competitive benefit for LU to keep Ricochet from working WWE - WWE's going to be much bigger than LU with or without Ricochet. This should work itself out in time but putting a little pressure on LU to make it right can't hurt.

Much more the latter; this seems to be an imagined drama of Blue Demon's life with some real names and locations thrown in. It's not like an crazy Demon luchador movie either, it comes off as trying to do a period piece in 1930s Mexico where the lead character happens to become a famous luchador. It doesn't get made without the Demon name but it's not taking much more than that. It's airing on Unimas starting this Sunday. The show got a lot of hype going before airing in Mexico, and then I haven't heard a peep since. It's on Blim - Televisa's version of Netflix - and that service isn't popular at all, so I'm not sure if the show just isn't interesting or no one's cared enough to watch it.

The original deals were said to be for seven seasons, with no time limit on how long they could be. That seems crazy, and no one's shared a contract publicly, but maybe it's a TV thing. I can't imagine it's legal to keep someone under a contract without giving them work for a long time, but the expense/effort of getting a lawyer to fight and burning your bridge with people makes fighting it the absolutely last option. (For both sides - nothing's going to convince wrestlers to stay with you than deals they can't get out of.) Not everyone signed seven season deals. Puma/Ricochet signed a contract that was three seasons long and could be different in some other way we don't know.

See, Dario has to take a long break to fix all the holes they punctured in the Temple. Very important the building is up to code.

They didn't really do a blowoff, so you're fine! But their previous non-title match would work. IWRG's channel (with +LucahTV doing the work) has started to post the bigger matches from their shows. It's the place to check, though it's on a little bit of a delay.

My impression is the hiatus is an El Rey call. The thing that makes it confusing to follow is when EVW was referring to people above him, you'd assume "AAA!" since it was presented at the start as an AAA thing. But it's not really an AAA owned thing. AAA owns part, but so does MGM and El Rey and many other people/businesses/investors. That's why there's a few different logos after the show ends, and two pages of people listed as executive producers. There doesn't seem to be one person or business who's got the loudest voice in all matters, and it seems like it's a lot of different groups handling different parts of the business. This is not all negative, all those different people bring different resources to the table (they wouldn't have the look of the series without El Rey, they wouldn't be on in France and Germany and Malaysia without MGM) but it also means different parent companies put different emphasis on getting things done. And, when things aren't working, it means there's a lot of powerful people with ideas on how to fix it, and a maybe not everyone involved agreeing in what to do. When EVW is talking about people getting things done, he could mean the whole conglomerate, or any part of it. (If you talk to AAA, they say they own a lot of LU. If you to listen to Konnan or others, they say AAA now owns very little of it. Both could have been true at different points - the owners had to put more money into this to keep it going, maybe AAA didn't put in as much, and so their ownership was reduced. AAA is probably part of the problems in it's usual AAA ways, but this is a different situation than the usual AAA problems.)

It looks like El Rey is just going to air really good episodes from the previous 2.5 seasons, so this is definitely more about stretching out the (really long!) season than taking them the show away entirely. It's weird and not well planned out - you could tell when they were muting out mentions of the Mack/Mundo title match happening in two weeks on this week's episode - but it's better than them disappearing in some void for a while. The late shift in plans just fits the pattern of the show itself not being handled well and no strong commitment to a long term plan. EVW was very much pushing a concept of Season 3 airing, Season 4 taping, and then finally actually touring. If Season 4 isn't taping until "October", where October is sufficiently far away that they have plenty of time to push it back again, then does the mythical touring not happen until 2018? Does it get moved up to happen this summer to give these guys something to do in the 14 month break between taping? No one on the outside knows and I'm not sure the people on the inside do either. A savvier group would paired the medicine of the hiatus/taping delay with some sugar good news, and either they didn't think to do it, or there's not a lot of good news to be had.

Unplanned hiatuses are usually even worse for a TV show, you'd rather be a wrestling promotion.

I feel like the tapings delays led to this "mid season finale", but getting both at the same time is not great. I was concerned that night when it was announced that night and people calmed me down a bit. I think they know when they're coming back, all the episodes will air, and this is possibly just a way to split up a long break between Season 3 to Season 4 into two smaller breaks. Still - that announcement was Wednesday. It was a holiday week, but it's now Tuesday, and there's not been a single word more said about a mid season finale. Not a token press release explaining what the deal is, not some big hype towards the last two episodes of this mid-season, just that singular 20 second ad outside of the normal context of the show. (It wasn't part of the episode, so I wonder if they included it in the iTunes episode, or if those people on a season pass will just be baffled when the episodes stop appearing in a couple weeks.) El Rey is not great at communicating these things and the lack of a rollout for the idea just seems to confirm it was a sudden change of course. It's rarely a good thing to be suddenly taken off air.

You do not see any of the backstage/office stuff. Occasionally, they'll do an off camera moment where Melissa will explain that Dario's made a specific match to prep the crowd, but usually you're not given any context outside of what you see in the match.

About 300. I think I used to know the exact number but I can't recall it.

Based on the way Faby bailed on the Japan show for no obvious reason and other discussions, I don't think Faby would've definitely jumped at the shot of working Lucha Underground (and spending stretches of time outside of Mexico) if offered back in season 1. I think her priorities have changed from what they may have been years ago, though I'm not certain.