It's Official: AEW Is Actually BACK
The C2 was excellent, particularly the Collision bracket. The tournament rehabilitated Daniel Garcia’s career. Brody King was effectively built as a monster whom it meant something to slay. Winner Eddie Kingston, who was so great at do-or-die intra-match storytelling throughout, excelled at the intensity and urgency of authentic tournament wrestling. The C2 was superb - even if not one Dynamite match reached the tier of the all-time great TV bout - in its plotting and execution. A lot of wrestlers emerged from it more credible than they entered it. It was a resounding success.
AEW has made “the feeling” canon, which is both good, in that the problem has been recognised, and bad, in that telling people is not the same as showing them.
There’s an element of Coca-Cola classic to all of this. Basically, in the ‘80s, Pepsi challenged Coke’s brand supremacy. Coke, inexplicably, changed the recipe. ‘New Coke’ was born. People hated New Coke. New Coke was the Devil. They liked old coke, which nobody ever wanted to go away. In response to the backlash, Coke introduced ‘Coca-Cola Classic’ - or rather reintroduced the original recipe. People were so thrilled to get back what was taken from them that ‘New Coke’ was ultimately discontinued because nobody ever asked for it. It wasn’t even a work; it just seemed like an ingenious marketing campaign.
AEW in 2024 is the worked version of the unintentional Coca-Cola Classic “campaign”. Tony Khan has acknowledged the backlash to his product and reoriented it.
AEW Dynamite: just like you remember it.
“The feeling”, said out loud. The G1 -style round robin tournament that fans have dreamed of and fantasy booked since AEW’s inception. The rankings system is back! The tunnels are back! AEW is back!
To underscore what an empty fan-service gesture the return of the rankings system was, it might have gone away already!
As much as this marketing campaign is hollow and grabby, the difference now, in the build towards and fallout from the seminal Revolution ‘24 pay-per-view, is that, at last, AEW is showing as well as telling.
In another phase of the campaign, Tony Khan tweeted, on January 26, “2024 AEW is the next 2021 AEW”. He was teasing the idea that, as he’d done with CM Punk, Bryan Danielson and Adam Cole, he was set to unleash the three hottest free agents - Will Ospreay, Kazuchika Okada and Mercedes Moné - in quick succession. Khan was also telling the audience that he had every intention of returning to form.
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