AEW - SEPT 2019

[John from Cincinnati]

Complain? I’d applaud their good sense! 

[Jiji]

There you go.

[LoneWolf&Subs]

It’s the match that made the most sense, and yeah that should go last.

Cody’s style can really cover Jericho’s flaws.

[Jiji]

That's a great double main event lined up and I'm guessing we'll get Hangman vs. Pac as well. Fuck yeah. Can't wait to see how they handle the Mjeff shit. Cody is nu-Sting. He needs to be naive as fuck at least until he is betrayed once. If it happened 2 or 3 times a year like with Sting, then yeah, it'd be problematic. NJPW has shown that the obvious booking decision sometimes is the best one. If Cody stuffs MJF's shenanigans he'll get criticized for being Triple H and not putting anybody over. 

[Raziel]

Gotta make sure the stardust magic is working at the top, daddah!

[LoneWolf&Subs]

I don’t know, I kinda liked that Sting was naive about getting turned on. It made him  endearing to me, like Superman was back then.

[Raziel]

My snideness at Cody's insistence on shot for shot remaking Dusty's career, he is the obivious #1 Contender and a good way to beef up Jericho for whenever Kenny decides to book himself a winning streak.

[Elsalvajeloco]

58 minutes ago, Tromatagon said:

Nobody better complain when the angle is Cody being smart and fucking him up right when he tries to turn because he saw it coming

Jericho is a Canadian living in Florida, his face is going to be red as fuck

Hasn't he been living in Florida for a couple decades now? He is Florida Man now.

[LoneWolf&Subs]

I’m not from Canada, but isn’t Winnipeg considered the armpit of Canada?

[Jiji]

Hahahaha, well lakes everywhere and it is unbearable in the summer.

[Nice Guy Eddie]

I'd be shocked if MJF isn't turning on Cody at Full Gear. Then, Cody can be out of title picture for a while. I would think Pac and the winner of Moxley/Omega would be next in line. Then, have Adam Page begin to climb the ladder back up against the likes of Jimmy Havoc, Darby Allin, Joey Janela, SCU, etc. By that time, Marty Scurll will be a free man and you can add him to the mix.

Edited September 6, 2019 by Nice Guy Eddie

[Dewar]

41 minutes ago, LoneWolf&Subs said:

I’m not from Canada, but isn’t Winnipeg considered the armpit of Canada?

Cold winters, beautiful summers. Oyaji spends too much time on the coast, he's a wussy.

[Jiji]

Keep your CFL football-sized mosquitoes, sir.

[LoneWolf&Subs]

I just Google image searched using the words “Winnipeg”, and “Trashy”. This Winnipeg Sun article came up...

[Jiji]

Some Dave news:

Re: PPV buys

Quote

As far as PPV goes, it was a mixed bag. Traditional U.S. television PPV was down significantly from Double or Nothing, although will finish well ahead of All In. Streaming PPV in the U.S. on B/R Live was up, although we don’t know by how much. TNT did a one hour hype show at 10 p.m. the night before, but on TNT, they pushed B/R Live as the way to see it and not traditional PPV as hard, so it made sense B/R numbers would be up.

FITE TV worldwide numbers were down. The people who bought it on FITE wouldn’t have seen the hype show. Losing Omega vs. Moxley may have been the key there and with traditional PPV. But ITV PPV numbers in the U.K. were up. The impression was that they expected to end up about the same as the last show, which would be considered a success. But based on the U.S. PPV numbers, I think it’ll be down slightly, since TV PPV was down in almost every city we’ve gotten numbers from.

The only straight number we have, which is U.S. television PPV, looks to be about 28,000 buys. Double or Nothing as of a few days after was closer to 35,000 and ended up 39,000, so this should have another ten to 12 percent added to that number when all is said and done. All this together would indicate something around 100,000, which, while not up from last time, does show staying power which was the big question. It’s still above what any company other than WWE/F and WCW ever did, and many of those companies had weekly television on strong stations. It also beat most of the WCW shows at the end.

On both television PPV and B/R, 46 percent of those ordering had ordered Double or Nothing. That means 54 percent didn’t. Does that mean they made new fans after the first show? Does it mean people picked and chose and some didn’t want to buy the first, and others didn’t want to buy this one? If that’s the case, then the hardcore audience willing to spend money for the product right now as far as PPV goes is much larger than we anticipated. But it’s also an audience less apt to buy every one. But the number of new orders, as well as non-repeating orders, to me, were both surprisingly high

On the latest WOR, he said that they will not be hiring any writers. The wrestlers will come up with their own storylines and will be given bullet points for promos and interviews. If they want to script out everything they can but it's not mandated. 

He and Alvarez think they'll do between 800k-1.1 million viewers for TV. Anything over a million would be fantastic, wouldn't it?

Most importantly:

Yes, please. Lance Archer and Darby Allin as the darkside A Boy and his Dinosaur!

edit: Meltz ratingz!

Casino Battle Royal: 2.25

Private Party vs. Evans & Angelico: 3.5

SCU vs. Jurassic Express: 4, raved about it on WOR saying it was the perfect opener to a PPV show

Pac vs. Omega: 4.25, I thought he'd have it higher.

Cracker Barrel Classic: 4

Best Friends vs. Dark Order: 2.75

Riho vs. Shida: 3

Spears vs. Cody: 4

Ladder tag: 5.25

Jericho vs. Page: 4

Edited September 6, 2019 by Oyaji

[John from Cincinnati]

Party like it's 2013, baby!

 Sometimes the obvious booking decision is the right one. But when everyone already sees what MJF is about from miles away, Cody is going to look extra stupid. 

A Lance Archer is exactly what this roster needs. 

Edited September 6, 2019 by West Newbury Bad Boy

[Jiji]

DRAMATIC IRONY, MAHN.

[Dewar]

1 hour ago, Oyaji said:

Keep your CFL football-sized mosquitoes, sir.

The last two summers they have not even sprayed my neighborhood  because the trap counts are too low. I have not needed to wear bug spray to play goalie in three years! 

[mattdangerously]

6 hours ago, Ziggy said:

I'm glad AEW became a thing before WWE tries to get him because he is so good personality wise he's the last person that needs verbiage written for him. 

MJF botched his own name once while doing color on an episode of MLW.

1 hour ago, Oyaji said:

On the latest WOR, he said that they will not be hiring any writers. The wrestlers will come up with their own storylines and will be given bullet points for promos and interviews. If they want to script out everything they can but it's not mandated. 

LOL what could possibly go wrong?

[Jiji]

We will see some spectacular highs and lows. It's what wrestling was up until the recent past and what it is pretty much everywhere except in WWE. The majority of territory promos are full of rambling awkwardness. But they also had the best promo guys ever because they were allowed to build up their skills by making mistakes and being given freedom to express themselves. The booker does the broad strokes and the wrestlers fill in the blanks, providing their own touch. Somebody at Squared Circle typed up that whole part of the conversation, so here it is:

Quote

Meltzer:

And we're going to see a live two hour show with no writers, just wrestlers coming up with storylines and having to go out there and cut promos and knowing their bullet points. And if they want to memorize their promos, they can and if they don't want to memorize their promos, they don't have to. But there's not going to be any word-for-word stuff. By the way, on RAW this week, on several of the promos were not scripted word-for-word, which is interesting. But let's face it, a lot of the scripted promos, we've complained about them forever, for the obvious reasons: they're badly delivered and lifeless and all that. So we're going to a new era or a new concept, and we'll see if pro-wrestling needs script writers to be effective on television, among other things. The jury's not out on a million things related to AEW. But there's going to be a lot of answers, or at least preliminary answers.

Alvarez:

Well listen, how successful AEW is going to be, no one knows. But let me tell you, the history of pro-wrestling all across the world tells us that, in fact, wrestling can be successful without script writers.

Meltzer:

New Japan doesn't have script writers.

Alvarez:

No. I don't think I've ever heard of an ROH script.

Meltzer:

Well they have scripts, but I don't know about writing word-for-word, for promos. Well, everybody has scripts... I don't know if scripts is the right word. Everybody has a television format.

You can read the rest here if you want. When he says wrestlers will come up with storylines, I imagine it will be like a traditional wrestling promotion where they run ideas through the booker* and the booker turns it down, adjusts it, or gives it the green light. This is what the majority of people have been clamoring for since WWF/E went over the top with their scripting.
 

* I guess AEW has a committee, but it's more or less the same thing.

Edited September 6, 2019 by Oyaji

[mattdangerously]

Giving wrestlers creative control worked so well for WCW.

[Archibald]

I'm not sure if it makes sense to bring up RoH and NJPW when you are talking about scripted promos. NJPW usually has only one promo at the end of the show that is usually done by thevsame group of people. Sure, there are backstage interviews, but they are not really the same thing. I assume that AEW will have more wrestling than WWE, but they probably still are going to have multiple promos during the show. And RoH TV is RoH TV, I don't think that anyone should bring it up as a successful TV format. 

Edited September 6, 2019 by Archibald

[AxB]

4 hours ago, mattdangerously said:

Giving wrestlers creative control worked so well for WCW.

There's a difference between some wrestlers having input (and using it to put themselves over at the expense of everyone else), and everyone having input. Wasn't a lot of ECW written by the Wrestlers? Like the Raven vs Dreamer feud was mostly written by Raven and Dreamer?

[NikoBaltimore]

10 hours ago, Oyaji said:

On both television PPV and B/R, 46 percent of those ordering had ordered Double or Nothing. That means 54 percent didn’t. Does that mean they made new fans after the first show? Does it mean people picked and chose and some didn’t want to buy the first, and others didn’t want to buy this one? If that’s the case, then the hardcore audience willing to spend money for the product right now as far as PPV goes is much larger than we anticipated. But it’s also an audience less apt to buy every one. But the number of new orders, as well as non-repeating orders, to me, were both surprisingly high

I wonder if they're counting bars that air the show show like they'd do for WWE, and if so wonders how much that factors into it.  I got DoN but don't see the need to watch All Out again.  But it was encouraging to see the place was packed.  I think as long as the TNT numbers hold up and it increases over time then AEW is in good shape.  I know I'm doing what I can get people to watch and so far so good.

[StretchMediatedHypertrophy]

3 hours ago, AxB said:

There's a difference between some wrestlers having input (and using it to put themselves over at the expense of everyone else), and everyone having input. Wasn't a lot of ECW written by the Wrestlers? Like the Raven vs Dreamer feud was mostly written by Raven and Dreamer?

It's also a different generation. Even the WWE locker room is qualitatively different to the Attitude Era or any time before that.

It's awesome that they ever managed to sell 50 dollar PPVs, but it's not a permanent thing. All-In and DoN were very special events - they won't ever quite recapture that, and the success/failure of the company shouldn't be and won't be based on that.

I think All-Out was clearly a much better show than either of those two anyway, but maybe that's just my opinion.