Matt Hardy has a warning for wrestlers who live and die by social media reactions — don’t let the internet trick you into killing something before it has a chance to work.
During his appearance on the Battleground Podcast, Matt looked back on the rise of Broken Matt Hardy and The Final Deletion. He said the response was split right away. Some fans loved the strange character work and cinematic style, while others thought the Hardys were destroying their legacy.
Matt said the wild reaction was actually a good sign. People cared enough to argue about it, and that meant they were emotionally hooked.
“I I thought so. you know, after we we shot the contract signing for the final deletion and it was done in a cinematic way, there was such a polarizing response to the things we did. Like there were a lot of a lot of fans who were just going, ‘Oh my god, this is amazing. I love this character development, you know, of Matt Hardy as Broken Matt.’ And it reminds me of the the Papishango days or the original Undertaker where it was magic and like larger than life characters where they’re almost, you know, like superheroes or super villains.”
Matt said there was also another side of the reaction, with people trashing the idea and saying the Hardys were ruining everything they had built.
“And uh there were other people that said like, ‘Oh my god, what are the Hardies doing?’ they’re going to ruin their legacy. This is awful. This is the worst stuff I’ve ever seen. Whatever it may be, but everybody had an opinion on it. So, I was like, ‘Wow, if everyone cares that much about it, that means they are emotionally connected to it to some degree and and they’re going to watch.’”
Matt said the key was sticking with the plan. He said the Hardys knew what they were doing with the Broken Universe, and they refused to let online noise force them off course.
“But then as people continued to follow Broken Matt Hardy and the story we was telling and they started catching on to our story beats then they look back at it and now people who say that they hated it originally and go like it was genius, you know, because like we we had a good idea of what we’re do. We knew what we were doing and we knew what we wanted to accomplish and we just uh we stayed the course and we did not listen to the internet.”
That led Matt to give a blunt warning to current wrestlers. Social media can help, but it can also mess with your head if you treat every post like reality.
“We didn’t listen to the people online. And that’s something that is so important that I can’t stress enough to to current wrestlers. You know, if you read the internet, I say this about social media all the time. The best thing about social media, it gives everyone a voice. The worst thing about social media, it gives everyone a voice.”
Matt said the biggest thing wrestlers need to remember is that online feedback does not always match what the real audience wants.
“And and the thing you have to remember is that like that feedback doesn’t reflect reality always. But like we stayed the course, we continue to do what we’re doing. And and as I said earlier, like uh the the the the broken universe, it totally reinvigorated our entire career and it’s ultimately what led us back to WB for that that run in 2017 through 2020.”
That is the part a lot of wrestlers could probably use today. Broken Matt Hardy was mocked hard at first, but Matt stuck with it and turned it into one of the biggest reinventions of his career.
Do you think wrestlers should ignore social media more often when building new characters? Please share your thoughts and feedback in the comments section below.
