Jon Moxley has had enough of Rampage.
Going into New Year’s Smash, it was well known that it was the final episode of AEW Rampage. On paper, Rampage seemed like a normal episode of…Rampage. But AEW really wanted to try and sell some extra tickets for World’s End.
First, the AEW World Champion decided that he was done with Darby Allin and destroyed him backstage.
But that wasn’t enough. Moxley was taking over New Year’s Smash and he had a message to the fans and AEW roster. But Orange Cassidy came out quickly and brought back-up, former TBS Champion Willow Nightingale. Once the girls started fighting, so did everyone else. World title challengers Hangman Page and Jay White joined in on the fun as well.
Then the camera cut backstage to PAC destroying equipment. That turned off the lights in the building. Moxley somehow slithered away from the chaos and went into the production truck. He forced the guys in the back to shut off Rampage. For good. And they did.
This was a clever way to end Rampage and build to the World’s End pay-per-view. While the brawling has become routine for The Death Riders, it was nice that AEW tried to give one final sell to their big show on Saturday night.
Tony Khan had a media call earlier this week about Rampage ending and he gave a diplomatic answer focusing on the bright side of the show being cancelled:
“I can’t say right now how we’ll accommodate that. It’s a good question to ask. With the company getting significantly more money, many times more money to produce these four hours of TV and focus on that, and then carry that over into the streaming platform, it is a change from doing five hours of TV. But we’ll be much, much, much better off as a company with this deal.”
“As for how we’ll reimagine the roster and how we’ll utilize everybody going forward, it’s a fair question to ask and it’s something we’ll have to look at, but I think there will be great opportunities versus a year and a half ago, when Collision first launched, we had been doing AEW for many years with three hours, with only two primetime hours. Now, this opportunity to have four hours in these time slots is just a great, great chance for AEW. It’s the biggest opportunity we’ve ever had. It will be a change, doing four hours instead of five hours, but again the company is growing, and it’s going to be a great opportunity for AEW, but it is a change. It’s a really exciting opportunity for us. It’s a fair question to ask about how we’ll handle it. I can’t speak to that now, but I appreciate you asking.”
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