The Ad-itude Era: Why AEW Caught Fire While WWE Cooled Off

The Ad-itude Era: Why AEW Caught Fire While WWE Cooled Off

Wilson Simons

    For about two years, WWE was untouchable. When Vince McMahon was finally pushed out and Paul "Triple H" Levesque got the creative pen, what followed was the hottest main-roster product since the Attitude Era. Cody finished his story at WrestleMania 40. The Bloodline saga was appointment television. It felt like the company could do no wrong.

    Then it cooled. Fans have a name for what came after: the Ad-itude Era. A product buried under sponsor reads, where the hype packages that used to explain why a match mattered have been swapped out for commercials, and where ticket prices have climbed so high that the families WWE was built on are getting priced out of the building.

    That last part isn't just fan theory. It's the stated business plan. At last September's Goldman Sachs conference, TKO president Mark Shapiro said the quiet part out loud: Vince McMahon was "primarily pricing tickets for families and wasn't totally focused on maxing the opportunity." Translation — Vince left money on the table by keeping shows affordable, and TKO intends to collect it. 

    Say what you want about Vince, and there's plenty to say, but he understood something TKO apparently doesn't, the kid you let in cheap today is the same one buying tickets to any WWE show near them in twenty years. WWE used to play the long game. Now it optimizes the quarter.

    The ironic thing is that WWE has never made more money than it has right now even though the product is more stale than a sitcom that should've ended four seasons ago. The Netflix deal, the ESPN move, record gates. This isn't a company in decline, it's a company cashing out. And that's exactly why the product feels worse to the people who built the audience.

The world's most expensive toybox

    The knock on AEW is that Tony Khan books like a fan who got handed unlimited money and his own wrestling company and that he treats his roster like action figures. Fine. Maybe he does. But here's the thing about a kid with action figures: he keeps them. He develops them. He plays with the same ones for years.

    WWE is the company actually throwing its toys in the trash. This spring's post-WrestleMania purge cut around two dozen wrestlers, including Santos Escobar who had just had triceps surgery. WWE re-signed him last October for a significant raise, barely used him, shipped him to AAA, then released him while he was still recovering. (Fightful's Sean Ross Sapp reported WWE wouldn't even let him rehab at the Performance Center, though accounts of that conflict.) Also the year before, Ridge Holland was released when recovering from injury when WWE released him> Holland had to go to social media to beg people to pay for his medical bills since he couldn't work to pay them. That's not a one-off; that's a philosophy. Tony Khan's sin is creative messiness. WWE's is treating people as disposable inventory. Only one of those costs someone their healthcare mid-surgery.

The trust gap

    The real difference shows up before the bell even rings. When AEW announces a match, fans trust it'll be worth their time. When WWE announces a banger on paper, fans brace for a non-finish like a run-in, an interference, a screwy ending that protects everybody and satisfies no one. WWE has spent years conditioning its audience to expect less.

    Booking pace is the clearest symptom. Bron Breakker was the hottest man in the company in January, going toe-to-toe with CM Punk for the World Heavyweight Championship on the first Raw of the year and looking like a future franchise player. Then WWE hit the brakes, because they always think they've got time. The Finn Balor and Dominik Mysterio split is the textbook case. WWE held the Judgment Day together for nearly four years and only pulled the trigger on the obvious, long-overdue breakup at WrestleMania 42. A whole year after fans started begging for it.

    Compare that to Darby Allin. He won the AEW World Title from MJF in April, defended it nearly every week, and dropped it right back to MJF 39 days later in a Title vs. Hair match. Darby's title reign was only thirty-nine days but people are seriously calling it one of the best reigns in company history, because every single defense meant something. AEW told a complete, urgent championship story in five weeks. WWE took a year to break up a stable everyone knew was breaking up.

Progress vs. regression

    The deepest difference is what happens to characters over time. In AEW, they evolve. Will Ospreay came back from neck surgery hunting Jon Moxley for revenge — Moxley and the Death Riders were the ones who wrote him off TV. But while Ospreay was gone, Moxley changed. So instead of a flat heel rematch, Moxley is now mentoring his former victim, forcing Ospreay to abandon his reckless high-flying style and reinvent himself, with the distrust between them dissolving a little more each week. The very injury that wrote Ospreay off television is the thing reshaping his character on it.

    In WWE, characters regress. The Bloodline was once the best story in all of wrestling and arguably the best story WWE has ever told. However, since then, it's folded back on itself. The Usos spent years slowly realizing Roman Reigns was manipulating them and broke free to become their own men. They've now been reset to factory settings, falling in line behind Roman like none of it ever happened. And Jacob Fatu, who already broke out from Solo Sikoa's faction last year, just got absorbed into Roman's group, teeing up the exact same breakout he's already done once. WWE isn't writing new stories. Just like Jay Uso, it's running them back.

    Characters progress in AEW, and regress in WWE. One company is building toward something. The other is selling you a more expensive ticket to watch a rerun.

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