Honestly, I’d prefer if they kept the interviews and backstage segments and the like to social media. From a kayfabe perspective, it makes no sense to let a wrestler interrupt your scheduled sporting event by grabbing a microphone and standing in the middle of the ring to talk at the audience for fifteen minutes, nor does it make sense for interactions between human beings to only occur during the live broadcast.
Imagine if you went to Wrigley Field for a baseball game and the marquee just said “TBA”, and after the national anthem plays, the pitcher from the Yankees came out with a microphone and started talking about how much Chicago sucks and the Cubs aren’t worthy of playing them, and then the commissioner of baseball sauntered onto the field and announced that he was ordering them to play the Cubs tonight in this very stadium. That is how WWE do.
so given historical booking at some point codys going to lose the belt to Owens or the Rock and roman is going to get his now-deserved face turn and win at WM via the Rumble
to me owens would make more sense story-wise cause with him its easier to pull shenanigans cody gets a kayfabe injury during the match
Okay, I’ll ask…if the two main men’s champions and the two main women’s champions both meet each other at Crown Jewel now, what happens to their matches at Survivor Series? Or is this an end to the whole “brand versus brand” thing for that PPV, possibly except for the two ten-person elimination tag matches themselves?
I’m guessing some kind of change to the Brand Championship Sashes (ala Homer Simpson- don’t say belt… don’t say belt…). But it will be a minor pointless change, probably ending up with even more belts as NXT is integrated into the picture.
There’s too many damn belts these days. I like it when there is one world champion. (Well, one for the men and one for the women of course.) And that green monstrosity that Hunter brought out is ugly as sin.
I was very confused myself about what that thing actually is. My initial reaction was that it’s actually a trophy that they simply made into belt form. Right now I’m regarding it as not that different from the King of the Ring trophy. An interesting prize to win, but not a real belt with like a lineage and everything. We’ll see it once at Crown Jewel and then it will never be brought up again. And they’re going to struggle to get fans to take it seriously. And I wish I had an answer to @That_Don_Guy’s question about how this affects how survivor series has been presented the last couple of years. But I really don’t, and I’ll be honest I don’t think they know right now either. Hunter probably has an idea in his head already about what survivor series is going to look like, it’s less than 2 months away I believe, and I would be surprised if he even cares about that belt or how it might figure into long-term booking plans.
I guess that means that Crown Jewel is now <Michael_Cole_Voice> the only time of year when Raw and Smackdown go head-to-head in the battle for Brand Supremacy!</Michael_Cole_Voice>
As long as we’re on the topic, the entire segment with Gunther “busting balls” on Goldberg was utterly cringeworthy. I really hope they’re not building to a match between the two of them, because Gunther deserves better and Goldberg doesn’t have anything left to show us that we haven’t already seen.
Personally I’d like to see a return to the original Survivor Series format - a card made up entirely of 4-on-4 elimination matches, with the main event being a match between the survivors of bracket A and the survivors of bracket B, perhaps with some sort of Royal Rumble implications for the winners of that match.
In contrast to the short card at Bad Blood, Wrestledream’s got 11 matches booked as of now, including seven title bouts;
AEW World Championship: Bryan Danielson (c) vs. Jon Moxley
ROH World Championship: Mark Briscoe (c) vs. Chris Jericho
TNT Championship: Jack Perry (c) vs. Katsuyori Shibata
International Championship: Will Ospreay (c) vs. Ricochet vs. Konosuke Takeshita
Women’s World Championship: Mariah May (c) vs. Willow Nightingale
Tag Team Championship: The Young Bucks (c) vs. Private Party
ROH Television Championship: Atlantis Jr. (c) vs. Bryan Cage
Best of three falls: Hologram vs. The Beast Mortos
Darby Allin vs. Brody King
Adam Page vs. Jay White
Mace & Mansoor vs. the Acclaimed
I was kinda hoping for an Okada match, but there’s still time for them to announce another match or two on Rampage. (Last year’s Wrestledream had 13 matches.) The Tacoma Dome is a downgrade from Climate Pledge, but should be a fun show.
The American Dragon has been slain. Jon Moxley took Bryan out with a sleeper hold in the main event of Wrestledream, ending his title reign and by extension his career. After the finish, Mox’s allies from BCC came out to continue the beatdown. Darby and Wheeler Yuta ran out to make the save - but then Yuta turned on Darby, cuffed him to the ropes, and strangled Bryan with a plastic bag. The babyface locker room (including a returning Adam Cole, who turned face in the same segment where a returning MJF turned heel earlier) then chased them off and Bryan got stretchered out to end the show. I expected Bryan to go out on his back, but it certainly was a melancholy execution.
A neat Easter egg from last night - the song from Darby Allin’s promo video, “Lonely Freak” by Seattle act Grindline The Band, was his ring music when he first started out in DEFY.
I don’t think Bryan is done with AEW yet. He’ll probably return as an authority figure of some kind, with the ability to enact some measure of revenge. Or, he’ll return to wrestling because his children changed their minds after seeing him suffer such ignominy.
Kurt Angle losing to Baron Corbin in his retirement match was bad enough, but at least it led to a post-career role as a producer.
Maybe. He’s been working injured for months and he needs a neck operation that he’s been postponing so he could finish up this run. There’s a good chance he’ll have to hang it up for good afterward, just like William Regal did after his neck surgery in 2014.
I could see him becoming commissioner of ROH or something.
I believe the original tag was, “Where teams of five strive to survive.” Okay, maybe the more accurate one was, “You’re considering airing Starrcade instead of this? Tell me, how badly do you want to air the next WrestleMania?”, but that’s another story.
IIRC, there was only one Survivor Series where the survivors met in a final match, and it was all of the faces that survived their matches on one side and all of the heels that did on the other. In the end, despite there being one match that the heels won 5-0, the two “ultimate survivors” were Hogan and Savage, so they could set up Savage’s heel turn to put the belt back on Hogan at WrestleMania V.
Last Monday on RAW, we started a new tournament for the #1 Contendership for the World Tag Team Title. Erik and Ivar made their return and defeated Alpha Academy. And they did it under their original War Raiders moniker, with new T-shirts, without Viking gear, and without Valhalla.
