10 Secrets Behind AEW's Booking Magic
All or nothing.
All Out was an aberration, even if the "cursed" take doing the rounds absolves, through its connotations, the creeping notion that AEW had courted the sort of disaster that befell Matt Hardy on Saturday night. As has been written on this author page before, fate tends to lick its lips and the envelope strip on the RSVP, when wrestling invites it.
Building a match based on the escalation of very real violence was a terrible idea well below a promotion that has otherwise mastered a fiction that the worked shoot hacks of yore never could.
This disturbing scene ruined the all-important vibe with which AEW had garnered such buzz and acclaim on its already legendary Saturday night streak, a sort of premium, big-time euphoria; as somebody who woke up late to the show, and started live from Shida Vs. Thunder Rosa, it was nowhere near the disaster it was slammed as on Twitter in a vacuum. This serendipitous edit still couldn't mask that this was AEW's weakest pay-per-view effort since launch, but the standard AEW has set for itself is stratospheric.
A humid slog when it sagged, some AEW fans might have even taken consolation in its relative failure: the company tends to respond from those incredibly well...
10. Connections
Jon Moxley and Darby Allin are the outliers. AEW is a promotion brimming with stables, teams, and indirect connections. Tony Khan, incidentally, is smart enough to build Moxley and Allin's outsider auras to legitimise their presentation.
At All Out, the Dark Order stable fell to the Nightmare Family: a unit made up of Cody's bloodline, professional colleagues, and friends past and present. Dustin Rhodes; QT Marshall; Matt Cardona; Scorpio Sky: all came together on Cody's behalf to avenge the brutal, seismic events of August 13. Rhodes used his veteran instincts to roll up an overzealous Cabana, earning in the process a shot at Mr. Brodie Lee's TNT Championship - the bloodily emphatic denouement of which AEW will revisit, in the weeks or months to come.
The recent addition of Ricky Starks to Team Taz prolonged the explosion of a Darby Allin Vs. Brian Cage programme that has crackled since May.
Matt Hardy has established natural connections with Private Party and the Elite to help him out in the event that he draws the ire of, say, Eddie Kingston's crew for holding onto that spot for dear life. That pitch materialised with a minute's thought, but that's what happens when the hard work is done to establish a narrative platform.
This method of world-buildin doesn't so much breed organic matches as spawn them, and it's all designed to hook you on the mother fish...