Matt Hardy thinks AEW sent too many people to the Hardy Compound for the Elite Deletion, and that the match suffered because of how poorly it was lit.
The match against Sammy Guevara in 2020 was AEW’s version of the cinematic format that Hardy had established in TNA and WWE. Speaking on the Extreme Life of Matt Hardy, he said the scale of the crew worked against it.
“I just feel like they brought all these lights and guys to hold lights and manage lights, but then we have to move so much, because the Hardy Compound is pretty vast, and a lot of these distances that seem like it’s not going far, it’s pretty far.”
He compared it to an earlier one-shot with four people.
“We did so much bouncing back and forth from my house to Jeff’s house, which was tricky, and we just had four people here working on it, and that was perfect. That’s exactly what we needed. You have a couple of people to shoot, someone to do sound, someone to do lights, but they had two solid crews. It was almost too many people. It was too populated in some ways.”
He said the finished product looked too much like television.
“The one with Sammy, which we called the Elite Deletion, was a little overproduced. It was a little too slick. I feel like these things look better when they’re a little edgy, and they almost look a little grimy. I think they’re better when they look a little grimy, look a little real, a little edgy, and it was almost too polished and too slick.”
“They were trying to light it up too much, and you could see too much, and it looked too much like a television production in some ways, although that sounds a little crazy.”
He rates the Firm Deletion, shot for TNA, above both.
“Whenever we did the Firm Deletion, it was done better. It was a much smaller crew, and we were able just to keep everybody moving. There wasn’t a ton of equipment to work around.”
He named the people who shot it.
“It was John Carlo and the guys down there that are great at that stuff. Eric Tompkins was here, Kevin Martin was here, there was Robert who shoots and edits stuff, and all three of those guys are just masters of their craft.”
Tony Khan was at the compound for the Elite Deletion and, by Hardy’s account, was not in a hurry to start.
“I remember TK was playing the game. He said, ‘ Oh my God, I love this game; it’s so great. I have one that myself and Jeff were on, and he was down in the arcade playing. It’s like, hey, we should probably get started, this is going to take all night. He’s like, oh, okay, okay, okay.”
“He sat out because they brought a full-fledged truck here, and he sat in the truck watching what we were shooting. It was almost a little overproduced, but I appreciate the effort that he was willing to put into it.”
The format started at the Hardy Compound in Cameron, North Carolina, in 2016, with the Final Deletion, which Hardy and his brother Jeff shot for TNA with a small crew and no advance publicity. It drew a large enough reaction that TNA ran several follow-ups, and WWE and AEW both commissioned their own versions after signing him. The Elite Deletion aired on AEW’s Full Gear pay-per-view in November 2020, with Hardy winning.
He has said elsewhere in the same episode that the WWE version was cut down by Vince McMahon at two in the morning, with instructions to remove the wrestling and make it hokier.
Hardy worked for AEW between 2020 and 2023. He is now with TNA both on screen and behind the scenes, and defends the TNA World Tag Team Championship with Jeff at Lockdown in Chicago on Sunday.
