Why There Will Never Be Another Wrestling Boom
AEW is an outstanding pro wrestling show for pro wrestling fans. It is that way by design.
The idea is to steadily win wrestling fans back, thus securing themselves a core big enough to score a rights deal upon the next renegotiation period. WWE didn’t expand the pro wrestling audience in the mid-1980s; all live gate data prior to the expansion indicates that the global audience actually shrank, and WWE merely monopolised it. Wrestling is a niche entertainment field that has never been more niche, and the two boom periods were blips in ‘craze’ interest, much like American Gladiators was. That’s the sad truth of things: pro wrestling is something that one famously “gets, or they don’t”, to quote Paul Heyman, and the ageing audience suggests the young people don’t.
The old guard will tell you that wrestling must have failed—look at the attendances, motherf*cker—but Warrant used to headline stadiums. Stadium rock barely exists anymore. The world turns.
Wrestling is so inherently farcical—just think of how many interactions you’ve had in which you were made to feel clinically insane for liking it—that is just isn’t geared for mass consumption, and when it was, fleetingly, the world could accommodate it.
AEW cannot ‘Change a World’ that is itself changing and fragmenting to an end nobody can foresee.