AEW x NJPW: Forbidden Door Highlights & Low Points? | Question of the Day

07/01/2024 04:17 AM

Welcome to another eWrestlingNews Question of the Day—this time, focusing on AEW x NJPW: Forbidden Door 2024 that just went down last night!

Results for Forbidden Door are in, and we’ve all had some time to settle on what went down. There’s no need for any big setup for this one. The question is as simple as can be:

“What was your biggest positive and biggest negative from AEW x NJPW Forbidden Door III?”

Pro or con, you can pinpoint a title change, someone winning/losing a match, the quality of a match being awesome or underwhelming, or even talk about how your feed crapped out on you during the show. Whatever it is. When you were watching this pay-per-view, what was your highest peak and your lowest point?

Be sure to drop your comment below to answer the question and keep the ball rolling.

In the meantime, I’ll toss out my answers, getting the bad out of the way.

Biggest Negative of Forbidden Door

The best they could come up with for MJF was a do-nothing opening match against Hechicero? Really? The guy was the face of the company for the past year and has been consistently one of the top acts from the onset before it was even officially AEW, and his return has amounted to a match against RUSH and then this?

I could be putting a few other things here, like Kyle Fletcher against Serpentico, or how Mariah May and Saraya doesn’t involve any crossover stuff for the crossover pay-per-view. But those more so just fall into the “every AEW event is overpacked” territory for me.

The MJF situation is more of a problem in my mind because it comes off to me as though there aren’t any solid plans of what to do with Maxwell Jacob Friedman, when he should be a top priority. I know that there are some stories building with MJF and Will Ospreay and Daniel Garcia, but wouldn’t that have even been a better use of time, having maybe MJF and Daniel Garcia team up against two people from CMLL that could have been properly built up into a feud?

This just felt lazy to me, like Tony Khan just wanted to see these two guys wrestle and that’s the end of it.

Sometimes, that’s fine. This wasn’t one of those scenarios for my personal tastes. The match wasn’t horrendous or anything, don’t get me wrong, but is anyone going to remember that this even happened by December? Let alone think that this was the best booking scenario available?

Biggest Positive of Forbidden Door

By and large, the matches delivered across the board. That’s the simplest answer.

But to get more specific, I would say my biggest highlight was the main event. Not only did Will Ospreay and Swerve Strickland put on my favorite performance of the night, but the finish helped put a few ideas out there into this universe.

Swerve has more of an edge to him than Ospreay. If and when he turns heel, it won’t feel like he’s having a sudden gimmick shift entirely out of nowhere. The more he becomes vicious to keep his title, the better that transition will be. Likewise, Ospreay didn’t have it in him to use the screwdriver, which furthers the story that he isn’t going to be corrupted by Don Callis and needs to get away from him.

Ospreay putting up as much of a fight after what felt like the inevitable “capitalize on the distraction and get the pin” moment also illustrates that he was well within a believable range to win the title. Tell me you weren’t thinking with those false finishes that Ospreay didn’t have a chance. I know I started to get fooled after being 100% certain Strickland would retain.

Down the line, those two will meet again. Based on what happened here, not only will the match be great, but it might end up going to Ospreay.

Again, don’t forget to keep the discussion rolling by answering this yourself in the comments below and stay tuned tomorrow for another EWN QOTD!

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