AEW’s annual Revolution pay-per-view is coming up this Sunday night, and on paper could be an all-time classic show. It arrives during a typically weird time for the six-year-old wrestling company, though, whose early popularity and success made it the target of an avalanche of criticism from wrestling podcasters and social media accounts. The unceasing hatred for AEW and its talent among certain quarters of the internet has grown so steady and so loud that it’s hard to talk about the company without mentioning it. It’s as much a part of AEW’s identity at this point as its superb in-ring action, and can seem so deafening that it might potentially drown out criticism of the company that’s actually serious and justified.
After growing pains and increasingly negative coverage from the wrestling media clouded AEW throughout 2023 and 2024, the company has built up some momentum on the way to this year’s Revolution. Critics have been predicting the company’s death almost since the day it was announced, but it’s still here over six years later, and in late 2024 signed a new, long term deal with Warner Bros. Discovery that is believed to make it the most lucrative non-WWE company in the history of wrestling. As part of that deal its TV programming started streaming on Max in January, and it’s on a streak of consistently well-received episodes of Dynamite and Collision that stretches back to late November—which is notable, after a lengthy period of even its biggest fans feeling underwhelmed by its TV shows. And just this week AEW announced a deal that makes its pay-per-views available live through Amazon.
No matter how its fans have felt about AEW’s TV shows or larger direction, its pay-per-views have always delivered. And of all its regular annual events, the one with the most sterling track record is Revolution, which, since debuting in 2020, has produced several of AEW’s best-regarded shows. A list of the best matches at Revolution is also a short list of the best matches in AEW history, from the Kenny Omega and Hangman Page vs. the Young Bucks tag team match in 2020, up through Sting’s retirement match last year. As AEW owner Tony Khan recently told Paste, “Revolution is one of the most exciting shows in wrestling, year in and year out.”
This year’s edition of Revolution airs live from the Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles on Sunday, March 9, and on paper it’s the most exciting AEW pay-per-view in recent memory. Hangman Page and MJF square off in a heated battle of AEW’s defining franchise players. Will Ospreay and former friend and protege Kyle Fletcher continue their run of state-of-the-art matches inside a steel cage. TBS Champion Mercedes Mone defends her title against Japanese great Momo Watanabe, in a rematch between perhaps the two best women’s wrestlers in the world today. AEW breakout Swerve Strickland and a newly reinvigorated Ricochet continue their feud with a match to become the number one contender for the AEW World Championship. Kenny Omega, who hasn’t lost a step despite missing over a year in a battle with diverticulitis, goes against the AEW International Champion Konosuke Takeshita, a phenomenal wrestler at the top of his game. And the TCM-inspired blood feud between women’s champ “Timeless” Toni Storm and former champion Mariah May—a one-of-a-kind wrestling story that has drawn heavily from Hollywood classics like Sunset Boulevard and All About Eve—should reach its apex with a sure-to-be-bloody Falls Count Anywhere match. That’s as stacked a pro wrestling card as you’ll find in 2025—so stacked that the late addition of Kazuchika Okada (perhaps the greatest wrestler of the last decade) wrestling the athletic bruiser Brody King, which could easily be the best match of the night, almost feels like an afterthought.
And then there’s the AEW World Championship match. Amid the excitement for this weekend’s show and that general positivity about the company’s broader direction, there’s also been a notable amount of criticism of the current main event storyline. Jon Moxley, the AEW MVP who is currently in his fourth reign as AEW’s world champ, is defending that title against Adam Copeland—the longtime WWE star formerly known as Edge who has recently adopted the name Cope in AEW. Moxley and his stable the Death Riders—which includes Claudio Castagnoli, Pac, Wheeler Yuta, and Marina Shafir—have run roughshod over AEW for months now, in what was framed as a vague, confused war over the company’s “soul.” Despite only joining AEW in late 2023, and missing significant time with a serious injury, Copeland is the latest wrestler placed in the role of “defending” AEW from Moxley and his goons. So Revolution’s World title match was initially between a guy who’s been at the top of AEW since its very first show, but is now a heel who has spent months issuing vague insults about the company and its wrestlers in promos, and a 51-year-old who has been placed in the role of the face trying to protect AEW despite still being most closely associated with AEW’s primary competition. Moxley and Copeland were both miscast, with motivations that didn’t really fit the wrestlers, and it was all a weird look for a company that has positioned itself as the young, upstart challenger in the world of pro wrestling. There’s been some storyline correction over the last few weeks of TV, though, with the whole “soul of AEW” aspect being downplayed, and the once deeply unpopular storyline has won over some of its harshest online critics. It seems to be peaking just in time for the PPV—which is what you want from any wrestling storyline. Despite his fame and his ample contributions to pro wrestling, though, Copeland still sticks out as a weird choice for a World title shot in the main event of an AEW pay-per-view, when there are so many other talents up and down the card that fans would be more excited to see in that spot.
It’s well-known that Tony Khan is a big wrestling fan, who got into the business and started AEW out of his own personal passion for the artform. It’s also known that he read and posted to online wrestling fan forums and message boards when he was younger, and he’s been very active on social media during AEW’s existence. So it’s unlikely he didn’t notice the fan disappointment over the Moxley vs. Copeland match, which probably drove the subtle but significant tweaks to that storyline over the last few weeks.
When asked about recent fan sentiment towards AEW, Khan—who speaks very cautiously and deliberately during interviews, thinking long and hard about everything he says—played coy. “It’s interesting to stay in touch with wrestling fans and their opinions and ideas,” he said. “You could ask 100 different wrestling fans who their top 20 favorite wrestlers are, and I think if you ask that question to 100 different people, you’d get 100 different answers. Maybe one or two people might have the same but it’d be pretty incredible if they did. I like to follow the opinions, and it’s certainly true to me that there might be one or two opinions that are outliers. But if you see the whole wrestling community getting behind a wrestler, getting behind a story or getting excited about a particular match, then it can tell you something, or take you in a direction, or give you something to base your ideas and opinions off of. So it can just be a good way to kind of double check your own instincts.”
When specifically asked about fan reaction to AEW’s current main event storyline, Khan focused on the response to last month’s AEW Grand Slam show in Australia, which happened just a few days before he talked to Paste. “I think people really have been very positive about [the AEW Grand Slam] show, top to bottom. It was one of the best cards we’ve had,” he said. “And I think people really love the show. It was a really well received event—of all the AEW Grand Slam shows, it might have even been the best we’ve ever done. And that’s a high standard, including the very first Grand Slam. So I really thought this was a tremendous event filled with great main event wrestling, and I think certainly it was, top to bottom, a show that was headlined by our top stars. And right now a lot of exciting momentum for AEW, going into Revolution.”
Much of the online negativity about AEW over the last few years has been driven by anonymous Twitter accounts and wrestling media personalities who work closely with WWE. Those people are never going to say a kind word about AEW—or, most likely, any wrestling company that doesn’t work with WWE. The negativity around this Moxley and Copeland match wasn’t confined to the WWE stans and pro graps grifters, though. Fans, critics, and forums known for honest, sincere criticism of AEW expressed their consistent disappointment over the direction the Death Riders angle was taking. It might be difficult for somebody in Khan’s position to recognize legitimate criticism amid the cacophony of permanently anti-AEW voices online, but the fact that the Moxley and Copeland feud has recently taken a turn for the better indicates he’s been able to do so.
Another notable recent change in AEW deals with off-screen talent relations. Khan has been reluctant to grant contracted talents their releases in the past, using that commitment to honoring contracts as another way to distinguish AEW from WWE. That might offer wrestlers more security than they’d know elsewhere, but it could also be seen as punishment for disgruntled wrestlers who requested releases. If a talent wants out, and a compromise that pleases both parties can’t be reached, they should probably be allowed to leave, depending on their specific situation. The week Khan talked to Paste started with the unexpected news that AEW had granted releases to two such wrestlers, Miro and Ricky Starks, who by that point had both had lengthy, unexplained absences from AEW TV. Those releases were followed by this week’s release of Day One AEW great Rey Fenix, another wrestler AEW hadn’t used in several months, and who is expected to join his brother Penta in WWE soon. Khan declined to comment on the record about those releases during his conversation with Paste, but he did address it during a pre-Revolution conference call with media this week, explaining to the Wrestling Observer’s Dave Meltzer that it’s all “a case-by-case basis.”
“It felt like the right thing for the company and everyone involved at this point,” Khan said of the releases of Starks, Miro and Fenix. “They’re all different situations but in this case those did have similar outcomes.” This, too, can be seen as a response to legitimate criticism of AEW’s previous policy; letting talent go directly to WWE might be a bad look, but the impression of “holding them hostage” and not letting them work could be a worse one.
When talking to Paste about Revolution’s reputation for greatness, Khan related a story he’s told before, including again on this week’s media call. “It was in my first year [of owning AEW], as we approached December of 2019, going into the holidays, that I started to see I had good instincts for wrestling, and actually I was not trusting them enough. And going around Christmas 2019, into the start of 2020, and the build to the original Revolution pay-per-view, I realized my instincts are good and I should be trusting them more. And going into Revolution 2020 I made a New Year’s resolution that, as of January 2020, I would trust my instincts more. And that I would delegate less. I was already over the top, overseeing all the creative in 2019, but I think I was able to tighten everything up and organize everything by getting myself into the weeds on every segment in every show, into the deep details and I thought that really served AEW well. And then over the past five years, as the company grew, as we started to produce more shows—we started with only Dynamite. Now we’re doing twice as much content every week with still two hours of great Wednesday night Dynamite and also two hours of Saturday night Collision as the team grew. I realized in Quarter Four last year that I wanted to make the same New Year’s resolution as I made five years ago, and really rededicate myself to being in the weeds, which means every detail of every segment of every show.
“It’s impossible to be on top of every single detail of every moment of every show,” he admitted. “I do think it’s been a very positive thing this year and I really believe that the shows in recent months, in the past month, have been one of the best runs of shows we’ve ever had. I think the TV in recent weeks has been fantastic, and it reminds me of the path to the original Revolution, with so many great stories and matches coming together on the way to that first great Revolution PPV. There are so many exciting stories and rivalries developing in AEW right now, and I’m very focused on it every day.”
Given the excitement for Revolution within AEW’s dedicated fanbase, and the upswing in interest in the World title match, Khan’s renewed attention to the details seems to be working out. And now that the TV build-up to Revolution is almost over and the show is upon us, AEW’s wrestlers can remind its fans why they’re here in the first place: for some of the most consistently great in-ring action in American pro wrestling history.
Senior editor Garrett Martin writes about videogames, TV, travel, theme parks, wrestling, music, and more. You can also find him on Blue Sky.
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