The Self-Destruction Of CM Punk In AEW | Wrestling Timelines
April 10, 2024 - The Wembley Footage
CM Punk is now an offscreen character - a virus that infects AEW as an entity.
Tony Khan appears to be operating with a siege mentality, treating his wrestling promotion not as a backdrop to title programmes and grudge rivalries, but as a sacred institution that must be protected at all costs. A cult. While the company has always marketed itself as a utopia of sorts, the soul of AEW becomes the dramatic stakes in 2024. It’s off-putting, desperate. AEW is telling you it’s great without really showing you.
This begins when, during night two of WWE WrestleMania 40, AEW shockingly announces that it will broadcast footage from what is known as ‘Brawl In’. This publicity stunt feels drastically removed from the early promise of sophisticated long-term planning.
This tactic is explained in storylines by the Young Bucks, who, building their match with FTR at AEW Dynasty, explain they only lost the previous encounter at Wembley because the Punk/Perry fight distracted them.
The footage is shown. After everything, there really isn’t a great deal to it. Punk advances towards Perry. They talk for a few moments. Punk appears to wait until Perry plays with his hair before aiming a punch at him. That’s a bad look, and Punk’s deeply unprofessional conduct obviously cannot be justified, but the wrestling world is expecting something significantly more damning; otherwise, why bother wading through this muck all over again?
Punk then tries to choke Perry out before Samoa Joe very quickly removes Perry from the scene. Then, Punk very angrily moves in Khan’s direction before he, in a split-second, is dragged away by producers Chris Hero and Jerry Lynn. Wild rumours of heavy objects being thrown at force seem overexaggerated, as does the entire fracas. (Khan has the right to feel threatened, all the same.)
Things get worse for AEW. This is an angle designed to reintroduce Perry, whose new ‘Scapegoat’ character is defined by the CM Punk incident. Perry joins the new Elite of Okada and the Young Bucks, who attack onscreen authority figure Khan in a rotten TV angle.
AEW in the process becomes every hokey U.S. wrestling product ever, and they tell you they’re special and worth fighting for at the exact same time. Stakes-free matches between the new Elite and representatives of AEW take place throughout the spring and summer. It’s all very cryptic and uncommitted. The viewers are left to infer that the Bucks are pissed at Khan for letting Punk disrupt AEW so badly.
Khan, in effect, embarks on a Stand Up For AEW campaign. He does it again in the autumn, as the Death Riders attempt a company takeover of their own. This one works, at least eventually.
It’s only until Hangman Page retrieves the AEW World title from its briefcase, at All In: Texas on July 12, 2025, that AEW feels like it has exorcised the ghost of CM Punk. Page is an emotional mess as he looks upon it. He’s won the big one. AEW has just entered its best three-month storytelling cycle in four years. Page, in that moment, might be thinking about May 25, 2022 - a twinge of culpability coupled with euphoric relief, of triumph.
Opening the briefcase feels like closure at last.