Predicting What The Entire Wrestling World Will Look Like In Five Years
8. The General State Of The Wider Scene
This is far more difficult to predict.
Impact Wrestling will live on in some form, shambolic or otherwise. The promotion has garnered low-flying raves in 2022, but this is an aberration. Ring Of Honor will exist exclusively as a streamed feeder league; if Khan can procure a TV deal for it, it's difficult to foresee it lasting. The market will become oversaturated, and AEW has significantly more prestige worth protecting in the inevitable event of everything feeling diluted and normalised.
The puro scene is enjoying a remarkable period of collaboration, but the old, isolationist impulses will be felt as time unwinds. This cyclical pattern has unfolded with such frequency that it is what it is. Before the collapse, every promotion of note will enjoy a renaissance of sorts as the clap crowds become a distant, bleak memory.
The North American independent scene will eat itself in some way. The annual Spring Break Clusterf*ck is more overlong indulgent mess than party atmosphere irreverence now, and the niche patter circuit in general has lost its charm, as all novelty trends do. A more serious hotbed will emerge from the ashes of the forced fun; look who made it in AEW after the super-indie era, and who didn't.
They'll be making documentaries and retrospectives on Game Changer Wrestling, which has stubbornly refused to dislodge its tongue from its cheek when on the precipice of garnering attention on a wider scale.