Welcome to the AEW Forbidden Door 2025 PPVPreview presented by GrapPro.com
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Forbidden Door 2025
AEW Men’s World Championship
Maxwell Jacob Friedman versus Hangman Adam Page (c)
Hangman Adam Page. Jay White. Maxwell Jacob Friedman.
That’s my top three for the men in AEW. Any combination of these men wrestling I am going to be interested. I don’t care what shenanigans they do with the booking usually. As long as two of those three are interacting I’m going to be excited.
Page and Jay White had a series of really great matches last year which were some of my favourite in 2024. I liked them a heck of a lot more than most people did. Jay White and MJF had a really putrid feud and a match which started with some seriously dumb melodrama but once they actually got into the match? I really enjoyed it. Until the ending. Essentially what I am saying is that the booking was the problem and not the two wrestlers wrestling.
Then you have Hangman Adam Page and MJF.
I still rank their match at Revolution very high. I absolutely adored it. I thought it was Maxwell Jacob Friedman’s best in-ring performance in years, possibly all time. It was also proof that All Elite Wrestling could take two guys they have invested years into, put them in a match, and let them… wrestle. Just wrestle. No shenanigans. No gimmicks. No frills and chills. No pyro and ballyhoo. Just. Wrestling.
So now, in the build up for Forbidden Door, we have the opposite. Before these two men step in the ring? It’s an absolute shit show. It’s overbooked. It’s ridiculous. It takes away everything these two men do best and puts them both at a disadvantage immediately.
If Revolution was when Hangman and Jay White wrestle? Forbidden Door is going to be more like when MJF and Jay White faced each other. They are at a serious disadvantage before the bell rings.
I should first mention that I knew this match was inevitable but I didn’t want it this early. In MJF Won’t Cash In I laid out why it made no sense for MJF to cash in this early. I thought AEW understood that as well, which is why they had been building up programs with Mark Briscoe and Místico. MJF is likely to face Místico at TripleMania in September. My hope was Mark Briscoe would take the contract from Max so Max had to find a different way to get another title shot.
Instead, AEW had him use the shot, get a title match, and then threaten to set Mark Briscoe on fire to get his contract back? How can you get your contract back when you’ve already used it? Somehow this made logic to AEW, and I don’t know who came up with it, but it sounds like a tired writer/booker trying to come up with a way to get back to status quo.
It doesn’t help the angle had Ricochet and Gates of Agony as essentially a surrogate Hurt Syndicate, which was a big tell that this was planned for a while and the Hurt Syndicate split meant they had to fill in a new blank. Just a really slop form of writing by AEW’s part.
I understand that Max has been taking a lot of L’s lately, from the loss of Hurt Syndicate to Hangman manipulating him into using his shot. You want the heel to have some advantage going into the match.
AEW has gone way far on it. MJF can now win the title on a countout or a DQ. And he gets the Instashot back. So he could lose the match, beat down Hangman with a lead pipe, and cash right back in to get another shot. Stupid.
We were so close to killing the Instashot. So close. Again.
One might say I should suck it up and accept that the Instashot is here, but it’s clear the decision to have MJF and Athena pick their matches was due to some form of pressure to not do it the way WWE does it. Sadly, this does seem like a cheap gimmick for a cheap pop that AEW is okay with being unoriginal and just riffing.
It’s clear that AEW is aware what a lot of us are, in that AEW has built up several strong babyfaces in the upper midcard or main event but they don’t really have the heels. Ricochet is one of the top upper card heels and he looked like a total geek next to Hangman. Konosuke Takeshita won the G1 Climax so you can’t use him to lose to Hangman on pay per view until that’s done. Kyle Fletcher is TNT Champion, and unlike Mercedes Moné, him eating a loss would hurt the title. We’ve already done Jon Moxley. It doesn’t leave a lot of other people available to face. It does make sense to do a rematch with MJF and Hangman.
Yet the way they’ve handled this is so messy and poorly thought out. It’s extremely obvious now that Hangman is winning. He’s going to beat the odds MJF put forward, and then we have a rematch down the road whenever MJF decides for it. Hangman not winning makes him the dumbest man alive to give all this up just to save Mark Briscoe, who went from a people’s champion to a damsel in distress in quick time. Maybe when Jack Perry returns the two can bond over almost being set on fire.
I also don’t expect MJF to win since that means he’d be losing in CMLL to Místico as AEW Men’s World Champion, which clearly Tony would never do. MJF is claiming to be CMLL World Champ anyway so it’s unncessary. Sigh.
I feel like this was a chance for AEW to be confident in their own stars. Hangman Adam Page could have straight up beaten MJF. MJF could have blamed his Hurt Syndicate drama, Mark Briscoe drama, and Místico drama. He could have lost to Místico in CMLL and finished his feud with Mark Briscoe, and then climbed back up the AEW rankings with wins against the many established babyfaces in the company en route to winning another shot against Hangman for Full Gear.
Instead? It wouldn’t be a surprise if they run this back for All Out, and even WrestleDream. Maybe MJF wins the title and Hangman has to beat them soon after for it back. It all feels wrong. This doesn’t feel like the steady hand that booked AEW from Dynasty to All In Texas. Whatever mess they have planned for this match? Hopefully it doesn’t stop them from having a great wrestling match like they are capable of.
