AEW Talent "Really Frustrated" At Decision To Air CM Punk & Jack Perry Incident

Sticking to their promise of showing footage of the All In altercation between CM Punk and Jack Perry on last night's Dynamite, AEW is certainly getting a lot of feedback from that decision on social media right now.

For those who missed Dynamite, a backstage Young Bucks segment was used to introduce the footage of Punk and Perry's All In scuffle. As the Jacksons explained, this chaotic scene threw them off their game for their own All In match, which is why they lost to FTR at Wembley Stadium.

From there, we cut to a silent clip of CM Punk and Jack Perry exchanging words, with the Second City Saint pushing Perry twice before briefly locking him in a front face lock. Samoa Joe broke things up, with Hook, Chris Hero, Jerry Lynn, and Sonjay Dutt amongst others on the scene, as Punk motions towards someone believed to be Tony Khan and then walks off with Malakai Black.

The response to the airing of this has certainly led to some fun discourse online, with a lot of people believing this does nothing positive at all for AEW, for Tony Khan, or the upcoming Young Bucks vs. FTR match at AEW Dynasty later this month.

Speaking on the latest edition of Wrestling Observer Radio, Dave Meltzer detailed how certain people within AEW are "really frustrated" at the decision to show this incident on Dynamite.

As Meltzer put it:

"You need to get past this, you know what I mean? It does nobody any good. I heard from people this week, a couple of people. When Punk did his interview, okay, I asked around and the basic thing was, like, 'Look, it's over and done with. [It was a] bad chapter in the history of AEW, and it's over, and there's no point. He can say whatever he wants, who cares?' There were a couple of people who were going, like, 'Adam Page never got to answer back' - and he will never get the chance to answer back because he doesn't want to be whatever - but most people were just like, 'We're over it, it's not part of our lives, it's not part of our company. Forget about it.' Now here, as soon as Tony did that, then I started to hear from people, and it was people who were just really frustrated going, like, 'Now it's back'. You know, the whole thing is back, and there’s things that have happened, and people have been made to look bad now, and they can't answer back. It opened up a wound that needed to be closed. They need to move past this, this doesn't do AEW any good. If I'm Punk, I'm laughing about it, honestly."

It's clear that Tony Khan wanted some sort of response to CM Punk's comments on Ariel Helwani's MMA Hour last week, and one has to expect this segment to pop a decent rating. But the other side of this is that any such strong rating would be based around one of WWE's top stars who you fired seven months ago and a Jack Perry who's been banished from AEW programming since All In.

Sure, this will presumably play into Perry's return to AEW, but the footage itself was met by chants of "CM Punk!" at the Charleston Coliseum last night, as was an in-ring appearance from the Young Bucks later in the show.

Interestingly, many posting clips of the Punk/Perry incident on X have had their posts pulled, and AEW has even opted not to include the clip on their own YouTube clip of that backstage segment with the Bucks.