Uncertainty Over How Forbidden Door Will Do On Pay-Per-View

Forbidden Door takes place this Sunday night live on pay-per-view. When the show was announced, fans had big dreams of seeing the top stars of AEW clashing with NJPW’s biggest names. Unfortunately, an untimely rash of injuries has watered down the card a bit.

CM Punk and Bryan Danielson are both out with injuries that will cause them to miss the event. Danielson has promised huge surprise to take his place, but AEW chose not to promote who it will be in advance. While Kazuchika Okada showing up was a nice surprise, many still think the show could use more star power.

On the latest Wrestling Observer Radio, Dave Meltzer talked about how Forbidden Door might perform on pay-per-view. Historically, crossover shows with Japanese promotions struggle to draw a paying TV audience. Right now, it is nearly impossible to predict if this event will be any different.

“The lineup when they originally came up with the card, obviously, if you put Bryan Danielson and Zack Sabre Jr., you put Punk against Tanahashi, I’m not exactly sure where Moxley was going to fit in, but it probably would’ve been somewhere pretty high on the card… I don’t know where he would fit in. He was going to be in the All-Atlantic tournament. Whatever it was going to be, you know, obviously, fate was not kind to this show and timing was not kind to this show and all that, but on paper, it is still a very good show. How it will do on pay-per-view, we’ll see… There’s no real predictor.

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WCW did a show like this for Starrcade in, I think it was ’95, right? And it did not do well, but the visibility and knowledge of New Japan wrestlers in the 90s in the United States was much, much lower than the knowledge of New Japan wrestlers today because we have not just New Japan World and the fact that they’re on AXS, even though AXS doesn’t get a big number, but the knowledge of them from a couple of years ago when New Japan was very, very hot, you know, it’s not hot in the United States now, but it was very, very hot and people do know Tanahashi and Okada and they were in Ring of Honor, and, you know, drew. Those shoes drew way over what Ring of Honor did. This show, look, this show sold out 16,000 tickets, so it’s going to end up being the second-biggest crowd in the history of the company, so it’s not like this stuff didn’t draw as far as the live crowd goes, but as far as the pay-per-view, a pay-per-view is different from a live crowd.”

We will have to wait for the buy rates to come out after the show to know if Forbidden Door was a success on pay-per-view. The show has already done well from the standpoint of ticket sales. Time will tell if fans at home are willing to pony up the money to watch the highly anticipated event.

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Transcription by Ringside News