Forbidden Door: Who Truly Benefited From This Super Show?

Sunday was a day of decision for me.   As I sat around my house Sunday afternoon I was torn on a decision that I had grappled with at length over the past week, should I buy the Forbidden Door pay-per-view?

As a huge wrestling fan during the Monday Night Wars, and then someone who went almost two decades without watching any professional wrestling, I was lured back into the sport when All Elite Wrestling was formed.

And as Covid wreaked havoc on the world in early 2020 and beyond and the rest of the sports world outside of professional wrestling and the UFC shut down, my appreciation for AEW spiked to an all-time high as it helped fill a void that the absence of sports during the pandemic had created.

Going into Sunday’s Forbidden Door, I had watched them all…..every episode of AEW Dynamite, every episode of AEW Rampage, and every AEW pay-per-view.  Yet, I could not come to a decision if my streak was going to stop at Forbidden Door or if I was going to soldier on and purchase the first AEW pay-per-view that I had extremely tempered excitement for.

My issue was mostly that I had little to no knowledge of New Japan Pro Wrestling and the men that competed there.

Sure, I had heard the names mentioned: Okada, Tanahashi, Ospreay, White, Ishii.  Widely regarded as some of the best in the world, but to the casual American wrestling fan, they are just highly skilled professional wrestlers from another country that will disappear from American television after Sunday night.

For me, the best professional wrestling is all about creating an emotional investment that comes from a great build-up to a match.  MJF/Punk, MJF/Cody, MJF/Darby, Hangman/Omega, and Cody/Brodie Lee, all extremely memorable feuds because of fantastic buildups that led to great matches.

But the Forbidden Door pay-per-view not only featured a lot of wrestlers that I was unfamiliar with, but AEW also failed to cultivate any emotional investment in the matches that would be taking place on Sunday night in the weeks leading up to the event.

So as I slowly pushed down on the buy option on Bleacher Report and slumped down on my couch, I was hoping that I would not be saddled the rest of the night with buyer’s remorse.

Forbidden Door was the spectacle that AEW and NJPW both hoped it would be.

AEW and NJPW deserve a lot of credit for the quality of this show.  After losing CM Punk, Tomohiro Ishii, and Bryan Danielson off the card due to injury they had to call multiple audibles on matches from their original plans.  One of which actually ended up adding some intrigue to the card as Zach Sabre, Jr. would be wrestling a mystery opponent on the show.

But you never would have known that a number of original plans for the show were scrapped because of the overall quality of the card, which really speaks to the depth of AEW’s roster.

While the build to Forbidden Door was weak and I had to Google a number of wrestlers featured at the show, the sheer level of talent that was competing in each and every match quickly dispatched any doubts I had about my enjoyment of this event.

The wrestlers from the two promotions meshed so well that it looked like they had been wrestling against each other for years.

Forbidden Door had a little bit of everything you could want from a pay-per-view.  The debut of Claudio Castagnoli as the newest member of the Blackpool Combat Club was one of the loudest pops of the night.  We saw Pac, an AEW original, crowned the first-ever All-Atlantic Champion after winning a great four-way match.  Jon Moxley had an unreal night by crossing a dream match off his bucket list and becoming the first-ever two-time AEW World Champion.  And maybe the most impressive thing that Forbidden Door gave us was the heavily scrutinized Orange Cassidy, along with Will Ospreay, cementing himself in the 2022 match of the year talks with an absolute classic singles contest.

Did the Forbidden Door create any new fans for either AEW or NJPW?  Probably not.  The vast majority of people watching this show were most likely fans of both promotions already and this show was put together to cater to those fans.

And for me, while I came out of the pay-per-view with a huge amount of respect for the talent that resides in NJPW and I hope wholeheartedly that this becomes an annual event, it didn’t make me want to actively search for ways to watch NJPW without the AEW influence moving forward.

The ones that benefitted from Forbidden Door the most were fans of great in-ring action.  Even as snakebitten as this show seemed to be, this was AEW’s best pay-per-view since All Out of 2021.