A strange announcement from AEW.
On last night’s Collision FTR defeated Top Flight in the tag team tournament semifinals, with the Top Guys now set to face the Young Bucks for the vacated tag team titles in the finals at AEW Dynasty. However, AEW revealed that the Bucks would be airing backstage footage from the All In incident in London last summer on this Wednesday’s Dynamite. While many figured that this would be some sort of bait and switch, a new report confirms otherwise.
According to Fightful Select, AEW talents were told that the footage will show the CM Punk and Jack Perry altercation that eventually led to Punk’s firing from the company. The timing of this is no coincidence as Punk unloaded on AEW during his recent interview with Ariel Helwani, where he addressed the incident and took shots at Tony Khan for the way he runs AEW. Fightful adds that AEW would not “falsely promote” something and then not deliver. There also appears to be no issues of legality in airing the footage.
Regarding FTR, one AEW sources tells Fightful that they wouldn’t be surprised if FTR were given a heads up about the footage airing as they were close with Punk during his time in AEW. It is reiterated that Khan respects FTR a lot.
However, Dave Meltzer from the Wrestling Observer says that the footage will NOT include Punk and Tony Khan, which Khan told fans/media that he “feared for his life,” and that it will only have footage of Punk/Perry. Whether this is a way to reintroduce Perry to programming remains to be seen. He has not worked an AEW event since All In.
UPDATE: Bryan Alvarez from Wrestling Observer also confirmed this.
