AEW Reveals Details For Interim World Championship Eliminator Series

Company lays out the plan to crown an interim champ in CM Punk's absence.

by Scott Carlson
CM Punk AEW
AEW

AEW announced more fully fleshed-out plans for crowning an AEW Interim World Champion at this month's Forbidden Door PPV, involving a multi-stage Eliminator Series.

On Rampage Friday night, new AEW World Champion CM Punk announced that he requires surgery and will miss a decent amount of time. During his promo, he said he offered to relinquish the title, but AEW president Tony Khan said that wouldn't be necessary. This led to a clunky explanation from the announcers, who initially said Punk had relinquished the title, then clarified that there would be a battle royal on Wednesday's episode of Dynamite, and the winner would face #1-ranked Jon Moxley to compete for the title at Forbidden Door.

Now, AEW has announced the full plans. The winner of Wednesday's battle royal will face Moxley in the Dynamite main event later that night. Then, on June 12, at New Japan Pro-Wrestling’s Dominion event, Hiroshi Tanahashi and Hirooki Goto will face off in an Eliminator Match for the AEW Interim World Championship, with the winner also advancing to Forbidden Door on June 26.

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The AEW Interim World Championship match would pit the winner of the AEW eliminator and the winner of the New Japan eliminator.

AEW also announced that once Punk is medically cleared to wrestle again, he'll face the interim champ to unify the two titles. Of course, there's already precedence for this in AEW itself, with the TNT Championship going through this interim champ/unification process a few months ago.

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Scott is a former journalist and longtime wrestling fan who was smart enough to abandon WCW during the Monday Night Wars the same time as the Radicalz. He fondly remembers watching WrestleMania III, IV, V and VI and Saturday Night's Main Event, came back to wrestling during the Attitude Era, and has been a consumer of sports entertainment since then. He's written for WhatCulture for more than a decade, establishing the Ups and Downs articles for WWE Raw and WWE PPVs/PLEs and composing pieces on a variety of topics.