All Elite Wrestling has been forced to run shows in an empty arena due to the Coronavirus outbreak. However, the unique circumstances allow for new creative paths to be explored and AEW is trying to utilize that as best they can.
In a live Q&A on his personal Facebook page, Chris Jericho revealed that Matt Hardy teleporting to the ring on the March 25 episode of AEW Dynamite prior to their face-to-face confrontation was his idea, but it did not go off without a hitch.
Jericho reveals that the segment was originally taped on Tuesday, March 24, 2020, but upon seeing it, Jericho wanted to re-shoot it to match his personal vision. therefore, they had to tape the segment while the show was already airing on TNT and had a very short window to execute this unique entrance for Matt Hardy in his first promo segment in AEW.
“I think last week in the Jericho and Matt Hardy confrontation, had it been in a full arena, would have been a crowd favorite for sure, but even more so in an empty room. I think it turned out really well,” Jericho began. “A little behind the scenes tidbit. If you saw the teleportation of Matt Hardy, if you liked it, that's all on me. If you don't like it, that's still on me. Cause it was all my idea. We'd actually filmed it the night before because they did some taping on Tuesday, we filmed one version of it. I wasn't there, I didn't get in until Wednesday. I didn't really like the way that it turned out. It wasn't my vision, really. So we said, 'well, let's go do it again. We'll do it on Wednesday and we'll do it right before the show starts.' So keep in mind there's nobody coming into the venue. So literally eight o'clock when we go live. There's zero people in there and there are zero people in there all day as well. So we thought, we'll film this before the show starts at 8:00. The problem was that the light-- the sun hadn't gone down yet. So it was still fairly light inside the venue. So we said, well, the Kip Sabian/Darby Allin match had been prerecorded. It was the one thing on the show that wasn't live. So we said, well, we've got 15 minutes to do this during that match, which was about 8:15 or so. So we go and we film Matt up here, and then he comes over here, and he was there. So we only had 15 minutes. Once it's done, it's pretty much done. So we take it to the TV truck and look at and realize there's a lot of missing pieces. And it's not quite perfect, but we have to do it and figure it out. So, myself and the editor put that together in about fifteen minutes.”
March 25 was supposed to be highlighted by Blood & Guts. However, that match has been postponed until further notice. Learn more at this link.
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