The momentum that AEW once had is no longer there following its launch in 2019, as the promotion started at a critical time in wrestling history. The WWE product had become stale, with all notable business metrics – ratings, merchandise & ticket sales, and social media engagement – being on the decline.
The momentum change
The fans rallied behind AEW for years, but since Triple H took over main roster WWE creative in the summer of 2022, things have turned around, and WWE’s business is on fire while AEW’s business has seen declines across the board.
As previously reported by Dave Meltzer, Kevin Sullivan, the Vice President of Post Production, was let go on Monday, a decision made by Mike Mansury, the Senior Vice President and Co-Executive Producer.
Many people in AEW thought highly of Sullivan, who had joined AEW from Impact Wrestling years ago. He built AEW’s post-production team. It was added that the feeling is “that the original AEW has changed greatly.”
Internal feeling
While speaking on Wrestling Observer Radio, Dave Meltzer talked about the internal reaction to the release and the feeling that AEW has changed from what it started out as.
“It’s interesting because today I’ve gotten so much feedback from people in and around AEW, and it’s a lot of negativity right now,” Meltzer stated.
Meltzer speculated that a lot of the negativity stems from the poor attendance AEW Collision drew last Saturday night, which was 2,025, per WrestleTix. The negativity comes at a time when while business is down for merchandise, ratings, and ticket sales, they’re making more money than ever. AEW is also not as close to WWE in the ratings as they were 18 months ago.
“The whole post-production team was his team,” Meltzer stated. “And so a lot of people were very surprised. There’s a lot of people that were not happy about this today, which is also one of the reasons, I think, why there’s a lot of, you know, again, all day hearing negativity is because of this one, because he’s been there from the start and there’s this feeling that the company is changing, which it always is, and it has to. You’re always going to change. But the feeling that it’s changed and it’s become something that it wasn’t.”
Meltzer noted this is another sign of the idea that they replaced an AEW original with a guy from WWE, as Mansury previously worked in WWE and was above Sullivan in AEW.
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