The third AEW Dynamite: Grand Slam event is in the books after the promotion held a stacked card on Wednesday night from New York City at the USTA Arthur Ashe Stadium.
Several titles were on the line including MJF retaining the World Heavyweight Title over Samoa Joe in the main event. Click here for the results.
The show had struggled for weeks to sell tickets, but thanks to a strong push from the promotion and its top stars, they sold a lot of tickets this week. While speaking on Wrestling Observer Radio, Dave Meltzer talked about the success of the show.
“I thought Grand Slam was a great show. They did their biggest final day ticket sales in the history of the company today. They ended up with over 11,000 people in the building. So it’s pretty darn good. I don’t know what the paid was because in New York, there’s so many media people and so many business partners and things like that that go to that they’ll comp tickets to a show like this, I mean it’s the same with WWE. WWE when they would run the garden, they were usually comping 3 to 4000 tickets. And it’s not like they’re giving away, giving them away what I mean? It’s like there are just VIPs that get comp tickets. The same thing here. Not that I don’t think it was 3000 or anything like that, but it might have been 1500 in that range maybe. I’m trying to remember what the first time, as I recall, they had like 2 to 3000. The first time they went the year that they drew 21,000 because the paid was 18,300. So, but yeah, I mean, they did a lot of promotional work. We talked about Cincinnati, where they didn’t do much, and a lot of these cities, where they didn’t do much. This one they were going to do seven/ So they really, they had, Max [MJF] was out there going everywhere. Tony Khan was going everywhere. Chris Jericho, Kris Statlander, and Orange Cassidy were doing the media rounds real, real hard. Max was at the Mets game, things like that and all that.
Local promotion worked and cutting ticket prices did some two-for-ones that helped a lot as well. So it ended up as far as the pure number goes, and the gate was very big. They had very high prices. So I don’t know the gate number, but I know that the advance was a very big number. so the show from that standpoint, which was a lot of people were looking at and saying, ‘Oh, it’s really bad compared to other years.’ And it was the lowest of the three, but you knew it would be the lowest of the three. but from a gate standpoint, it probably wasn’t that far behind last year, and last year wasn’t really that far behind the first. I think last year actually beat the first year because of the higher ticket prices and this year.”
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