6 Ups & 4 Downs From AEW Dynamite (October 18 - Results & Review)
The Icon makes a HUGE announcement about his future and MJF's got challengers everywhere he turns.
These are challenging times for All Elite Wrestling, sort of.
Last week's "Title Tuesday" edition of AEW Dynamite lost a ratings war to NXT, but we'll never know how much of that was down to a star-laden edition of the Performance Center show loaded up with John Cena, The Undertaker and former AEW EVP Cody Rhodes. Rough guess is "a lot", but the loss wasn't one to brush off on those terms alone. WWE - and by some extension NXT based on all the graphs you can plot - is substantially hotter commercially, posting-good to great numbers in terms of TV and tickets, and winning every other objective battle even if there are plenty of subjective culture wars still being fought.
This is new ground for mainstream wrestling in the modern age too - the Number Two promotion being good (though not always great) while the the Number One steals a march isn't something that really happened last time around. When WCW took hold of things in 1996, WWE was in desperate need of a creative reshuffle. When said reshuffle generated results by 1998, World Championship Wrestling's decline felt expedited. 1999 and 2000 weren't so much as battles but squash matches, foreshadowing the inevitable and pathetic end to things in 2001.
The "new era" Tony Khan promoted might have been for the arrival of Adam Copeland, but is the real one this brave new world of an actual market leader closely followed by an actual challenger brand? And was this Dynamite any kind of response to the recent defeat and subsequent backlashes, or another statement of intent that AEW can wilfully be something completely different to the alternative?
Let's light the fuse...