10 Shocking AEW Plans You Won't Believe Almost Happened
AEW's first 5 years could've been even wilder had any of this happened.
AEW's first 5 years have been a whirlwind. Critically-acclaimed matches aplenty, bogus pyro that wrecked a pay-per-view main event, Bryan Danielson and Adam Copeland becoming #AllElite, Cody Rhodes and Jade Cargill going the other way back to WWE, all the backstage drama involving CM Punk, Tony Khan's online antics and much, much more.
It's been a journey, and it could've been even crazier.
You won't believe all of the things that Tony has nearly pulled off since properly launching the company in 2019. At one point, he toyed with the thought of repeating one of WWE's worst angles of the modern age, and that's just for starters - other abandoned plans include scrapped heel supergroups, complete ignorance of a wrestler's physical state, turns that nobody needed to see, and signing some more big names to bumper contracts.
AEW even thought about turning real life beef between Punk and The Elite members into an on-screen angle, but there's no guarantee everyone could've behaved themselves on TV. Cooler heads prevailed there, for once!
Would you have enjoyed seeing All Elite try on any of this?!
10. AEW Repeating WWE’s Love Triangle
Dolph Ziggler's 19-year run with WWE ended when his contract expired in September 2023. It was a lowkey end for Nic Nemeth, but he didn't stand still. Nic joined TNA's rebrand train and has since become the group's World Champ. Things would have been very different had Nemeth become #AllEite, however.
One proposed plan for him was to redo an old WWE story.
Various reports around the time suggested that Tony Khan wanted to outright repeat WWE's dreaded love triangle storyline between Nemeth, CJ Perry and Miro. As Ziggler, Lana and Rusev respectively, the trio had stunk out the joint in 2015 with a confusing story that also included Summer Rae. To put it mildly, the feud didn't do much for anyone involved, so it's hard to imagine that AEW producing their own version would've worked.
The last thing AEW needs is to rehash crappy WWE angles that people hated the first time. Perry recruited Andrade and came close to managing Action Andretti during her brief stay in All Elite. Apparently, if these reports are accurate, Nemeth would've been next, and echoes of WWE's past would've lingered on Dynamite.
No thanks.