The "let's not take this shyt so seriously" AEW news & fukkery thread

Cattle Mutilation

Cattle Mutilation

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Luchablog on Grand Slam

Tickets are virtually sold out for 06/18 AEW Grand Slam at Arena Mexico. Tickets were no longer available on Ticketmaster this morning, and then they put a few more out there. This is the entire arena on sale with the exception of the Freedom restaurant. (I don’t think that’s typically open for non-CMLL events.)

The two CMLL shows sandwiching Grand Slam – the Tuesday and Friday special cards – seem to be selling well for shows six weeks away and with a single match announced between them. They are not anywhere near sold out, and some areas of those buildings have not been put on sale. I do not doubt that those shows will end up doing well, and I’d suggest that anyone planning to attend all three not wait forever if they’re set on getting a good ticket.

Let’s put that aside. Well-intentioned people may believe all Friday Arena Mexico shows sell out. (This is false.) Only lunatics would believe all Tuesday Arena Mexico shows sell out, and that’s the correct comparison. Like Dynamite, it’s a midweek show. The Tuesday show before Grand Slam will feature CMLL wrestlers against AEW and ROH wrestlers, and CMLL has promoted that fact in the name of the show. The Tuesday show has far cheaper ticket prices, is on a familiar day of the week, and at an easier time for people to attend. CMLL also has deals with Turiluchas and many other tourist bus services to bring non-fans to the Tuesday shows; anyone who’s watched CMLL pre and post-COVID can see the big difference that’s made for Tuesday shows specifically. Those tourist buses aren’t there for Wednesday shows, because Wednesday Arena Mexico shows don’t exist. With all those advantages, the Tuesday show has still sold far fewer tickets. It would probably be a bit closer if CMLL released a promotional piece for Tuesday featuring Will Osprey and Kenny Omega, or any two top stars of AEW. Those names are definitely a factor. The biggest factor is its “AEW Dynamite Grand Slam Mexico”, a major US wrestling TV taping in a country that has received promises of WWE TV tapings happening “really soon” for a decade. A Mexican wrestling scene where WWE is running a TV taping once a year or once every few years probably still supports this AEW taping strongly, but Grand Slam Mexico is a major event because it is the first major league (sorry TNA) taping in Mexico City in over a decade. It is not “tickets sold out in 48 hours” craziness if WWE didn’t starve them out. I’m sure WWE didn’t make enough money running those TV tapings to justify running more of them, and they probably did well with those tapings elsewhere. The tradeoff for those profits was leaving the door open for someone else in Mexico.

If you want to knock AEW for anything today, you should knock them for lacking the courage to run Collision in Mexico, too. Hindsight is 20/20, but I’m sure they’d rather have another Arena Mexico date rather than taping three shows in Kent, Washington, later that week. There will certainly be a Grand Slam Mexico 2026 after this result.

Grand Slam Mexico needs to be put together like a normal AEW TV taping. It should hopefully be a strong TV taping, but the thing that people paid all the money for was to see a real live US TV taping and not an attempt at a CMLL homage show. They will get those CMLL shows on Tuesday and Friday. Give them what they want on Wednesday.

I’m still a bit surprised WWE didn’t try to throw together a quick NXT show in the Pepsi Center or Juan de la Barrera and announced it before tickets went on sale for Grand Slam. Throwing together a full roster TV taping at the last minute is probably asking too much, but any sort of TV taping would’ve been of interest. What was announced – TripleMania Regia and World’s Collide – will likely receive some attention and may have drawn some fans away, but it didn’t harm this AEW show.

WWE made some mistakes here. I did too. As many times as I wrote “this is an AEW produced show, not a CMLL one”, I still treated it like a CMLL show when tickets went on sale and just got stuff wrong as a result. A CMLL big show is going to have all the areas opened up at once. AEW’s strategy over the last few years is to open some of the sections at once, and then open up more as demand requires – that meant I was talking about few tickets being left when there were entire sections unsold. The CMLL VIP experience tends to be an add-on, something sold outside of the Ticketmaster system. The AEW one is sold through Ticketmaster, and so when I mentioned a “8174 pesos” price being higher than any Mexican ticket, I was making an apples-to-oranges comparison. (The non-VIP high price seemed to be 2187, which brings it lower than the recent Aniversarios.) The end result isn’t a big deal; the tickets sold out, but I don’t like it when I put out bad information. I should have stepped back and just retweeted Wrestletix’s posts.
Click to expand...
 
Cattle Mutilation

Cattle Mutilation

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Jmare007 said:
Compare that thing to Dave's double talk mess or SRS cheap "more info coming soon! bullshyt and it's night and day. And cubsfans doesn't charge a damn thing :wow:

He even apologizes for getting shyt wrong :russ:
Click to expand...
Cubsfan/luchablog just needs to learn how to press the enter/return key a bit more frequently. Man loves a 100 sentence paragraph
 
Cattle Mutilation

Cattle Mutilation

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And as he said in his article, the tourist setup they rely on for their shows doesn’t exist for Wednesdays because CMLL never runs Wednesday shows. So if any of these people are tourists, then they are going out of their way to head to Arena Mexico for it.
 
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