On January 5th, New Japan Pro-Wrestling and AEW came together along with CMLL, STARDOM, and ROH to present Wrestle Dynasty.
The joint show followed up on the annual Forbidden Door event, which is a joint venture between the partner promotions.
Speaking on AEW Unrestricted, Rocky Romero discussed Wrestle Dynasty coming together.
“Yeah, very similar to Forbidden Door like you said. This time, it started — there was always the conversation between AEW and New Japan of like, how can we bring Forbidden Door to Japan, is that an option? Because obviously this year, it’ll be in London and we saw it in Toronto, Canada just a couple years ago. I feel like it’s such a great event that’s able to move around from country to country and maybe we will see Forbidden Door in Japan at some point, but I think New Japan wanted to kind of bring their version to Japan and they also kind of felt like, okay, it’s our turn to host now. We’ll host the party, you’ve been hosting the party for a couple of years, we’ll host the party, and why not make it a weekend? Wrestle Kingdom, the traditional event, it’s always on January 4. So, when you get it on a weekend, it makes sense to do a back to back event. When the ideas are going around, it’s like, what should we do? Do we do two nights of Wrestle Kingdom? Maybe this is a good opportunity to bring AEW. Then it was like, instead of just Forbidden Door, an AEW and New Japan co-branded show, why don’t we bring the rest of the partners in? Let’s bring Stardom, Ring Of Honor. Let’s bring CMLL. All the big partners, we had representation from the Rev Pro Women’s Champion at the time, Mina Shirakawa. So, it was a cool way to kind of bring them all together like Forbidden Door but slightly different with everyone being involved.
“The actual name Wrestle Dynasty was pre-pandemic. New Japan had plans to come back to Madison Square Garden and it was going to be called Wrestle Dynasty. We’d been sitting on the IP for the whole time and we had these logos made and everything and I was like, I feel like this could be a Wrestle Dynasty moment, a great way to introduce that IP. It kind of just all worked out and came together smoothly there. The hard stuff starts when you’re negotiating who’s gonna be on it and everything like that, but we got there.”
AEW and NJPW will partner again for Forbidden Door in London on August 24th.
Elsewhere during the interview, Rocky discussed having Gabe Kidd vs. Kenny Omega at NJPW x AEW Wrestle Dynasty. You can find his full comments by clicking here.
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