AEW WrestleDream 2024: 3 Things We Hated And 3 Things We Loved

Welcome to Wrestling Inc.'s annual review of AEW WrestleDream! Last year, the show ended with a former WWE star who once retired due to injury making his AEW debut and kicking off a new chapter in his career. This year, the show ended with a former WWE star who once retired due to injury being nearly beaten to death after losing his final match as a full-time competitor. Life comes at you fast.

Let's get right to it, shall we? You know the score — we can't hit everything from this PPV here in this opinion column, but our WrestleDream results page is available if you need to know the detailed facts. Obviously we have many, many thoughts on Jon Moxley apparently ending Bryan Danielson's career, as well as thoughts on "Switchblade" Jay White besting "Hangman" Adam Page, Mariah May overcoming the challenge from Willow Nightingale, MJF and Adam Cole making their return, and Private Party coming up short against The Young Bucks. Our apologies to the rest of the show, but this column is limited to the matches and segments that gave the WINC staff the biggest feelings. Here are three things we hated and three things we loved about AEW WrestleDream 2024!

After the fifth anniversary edition of "AEW Dynamite," I said that AEW has the chance to finally do what they should have done from the moment he signed with the company; push Jay White like a legitimate star. Yes, he had a feud over the AEW World Championship last year, but that hurt White's momentum in the same way jumping on a bunch of LEGO bricks with no shoes on would hurt my feet. However, Jay White beat "Hangman" Adam Page clean in the middle of the ring in the opening contest of AEW WrestleDream, and I have to say, it feels good.

It was a little shocking to me that they would open the show with this match after so many years of hearing "open the show hot" led me to believe that something like The Beast Mortos vs Hologram or Darby Allin vs Brody King would have gone on first. This match was given time, made both guys look great, and told a simple but effective story. White has always been a "smart" wrestler and knew immediately when Page's leg buckled off a German Suplex reversal that if he kept going after the knee, Page wouldn't be able to hit the Buckshot Lariat with the same force he usually does, and they just went from there.

What they do afterwards remains to be seen. Hangman could become even more insane than he already is which, if that happens, he is one loss away from coming out in a straight jacket, or they could leave this feud here and White can write the second wrong he keeps talking about. That second wrong seems to be Christian Cage, who just so happens to have a guaranteed shot at the AEW World Championship, giving Jay White fans around the world more signs that he is in fact going to be in amongst the main event scene. Given that this is AEW in 2024, this could all get changed in about three weeks time, but on this night, it truly feels like the Switchblade Era is upon us, and we will all need to prepare to breathe with him.

Written by Sam Palmer

Mariah May and Willow Nightingale had the honor (or perhaps dishonor) of being the lone women's match on the main WrestleDream card. However, despite also having the unenviable placement of second match on the main card, they more than delivered.

Nightingale and May were evenly matched all night long with each one being able to counter the other's finisher. We even saw a different side of "The Babe With the Power" when she bit the champion to gain control of the match and used it to her advantage. May has been a fighting champion since winning at All In, but Nightingale proved to be her toughest challenger yet and gave "The Glamour" her best match as champion. These are the type of matches May should be having regularly, and at some point down the road, Nightingale could be the one to dethrone her.

This match should've gotten at least five more minutes and should've been positioned further down the card, but May and Nightingale showed up and showed out and had one of the best matches of WrestleDream 2024.

Written by Samantha Schipman

As someone whose sole experience with being emotionally invested in a long-running AEW angle came when MJF and Adam Cole were discovering their friendship last year, I'm personally offended by where that story is today, just over a year after Cole hurt his ankle. Obviously that injury changed literally everything about where the story was going, but even under those circumstances I feel like AEW couldn't have botched this any harder if they tried.

First you had the long, drawn-out, universally panned "Devil" angle, which culminated with Cole betraying MJF at Worlds End and forming the Undisputed Kingdom. Not only was this some of the worst content AEW has ever produced, AEW couldn't even pay it off; Cole made a brief appearance at Double or Nothing in May so MJF could get a small semblance of revenge, but he's been gone ever since. In his absence, the stable put together specifically for him has floundered, with one of its members, Wardlow, having been MIA for more than six months. Now Cole is finally back — but not before AEW turned MJF heel again.

Restoring MJF to his original heelish ways was a dead-end creative move in its own right, but it's even worse in the context of what happened at WrestleDream. Not only was Cole's return the culmination of an utterly ridiculous stretch following Jack Perry's TNT title defense that had already seen Daniel Garcia come out and MJF himself return from a brief stint away, but Cole was set up as the babyface saving Garcia from MJF's attack and running him off to the delight of the crowd. Cole even went so far as to appear again later in the show with the group of AEW babyfaces running down to the ring to try and save an already beaten Bryan Danielson from his former allies in the Blackpool Combat Club.

Cole instantly turning full babyface at this point makes exactly as little sense as MJF turning heel did, but here we are. Cole and MJF have come full circle, back to where they started in the summer of 2023, and that whole massive storyline that I was so invested in — that main-evented AEW's debut event at Wembley Stadium — is rendered kind of meaningless. I'm sure in the weeks to come they will have lots and lots of explanations and Cole will come out to explain to the crowd why he loves them again, but it doesn't really matter. There's no storyline reason for Cole coming back as a face; he came back as a face because when he was ready to come back, MJF was a heel, and this was our only idea. The end.

People who accuse AEW of not telling stories are stupid. Of course AEW tells stories. But if anyone ever says to me that AEW is good at telling stories, I will point to MJF vs. Adam Cole as my first counter-example.

Written by Miles Schneiderman

The idea of pushing Private Party into an AEW Tag Team Championship match at this stage in their careers is not a bad thing by any stretch. They've been in the company for five years, have beaten The Young Bucks, and are two guys who, when people say AEW's tag team division needs some fresh blood, are perfect candidates.

Isiah Kassidy and Marq Quen were given the full treatment coming into WrestleDream. They had the new entrance theme (which is growing on me to be honest), more promo time, and a victory over the champs on TV. At the show, they got a full video package, complete with The Amazing Red giving them a motivational speech about how this is their time, seize the day, do it for New York and all that, the type of package reserved for a team that will get a big cathartic moment at the end of the match. Even Matthew Jackson told them they've been living off their first win for five years and will never amount to anything, everything was pointing to AEW actually saying screw it, pull the trigger...and then they lost?

Honestly, what was the actual point in any of it? I get that if there was no package or promo beforehand, it would have been even more obvious that they were losing. However, if AEW are planning on giving Private Party the belts at some point in the near future, why not reserve all of these special details FOR WHEN THEY WIN THE BELTS? All of that work kind of just fell flat on its face through the result, and the standi–no not standing, SITTING OVATION they got at the end of the match says it all. People went into the match optimistic that they might see something special, and by the time the bell rang, they had gone from hopeful to expectant, and their expectations weren't met because AEW didn't do the thing that they should have done months and years earlier; push Private Party properly.

There is obviously still time, and Full Gear next month takes place in New Jersey which in the world of wrestling may as well be New York most of the time, but this feels like a missed opportunity.

Written by Sam Palmer

25 years after lacing up his boots for the first time, AEW WrestleDream marked the end of Bryan Danielson's full-time career, the "American Dragon" slain by the man he once called brother in Jon Moxley.

Since he re-emerged on the "AEW Dynamite" immediately following Danielson's world title win, Moxley was a different beast entirely to that who had been felled by Tetsuya Naito in June. He never said a word of congratulations to his Blackpool Combat Club co-founder, instead making it clear he was looking to shift the landscape of the company in one way or another. That landscape change came for the BCC first, ejecting their broken mentor and restructuring a formidable outfit with PAC and Marina Shafir as its new blood, finally setting his sights on taking everything Danielson held dear. Saturday night became a vision manifested, a hard-fought battle won by spite and determination for the "Death Rider," choking the life out of his opponent, title reign, and career to suck all the atmosphere from the building as the bell finally rung. If Sting's retirement was a fairytale, this was a nightmare conjured from the depths of Dante's Inferno.

Danielson is a stubborn wrestler, fighting his way back from a knife's edge with his return from retirement in 2018 and every time he has laced up since. So it just made sense that he would be retired by force, and Moxley did that and then some. As if to remove the possibility that Danielson returned during next week's "AEW Dynamite" to call for one more time, Moxley and the BCC savaged him, snuffing the candle flame rather than leaving it to go out of its own accord. It was betrayal upon betrayal, Wheeler Yuta hammering that final nail in the coffin with a Busaiku Knee to his mentor, presenting the new BCC in its full form for the first time since All Out.

Danielson's run in AEW has been a tale of the world's most seasoned and complete wrestler putting himself through the ringer in the name of presenting the future of the company. He undoubtedly established "Hangman" Adam Page as a credible World Champion as his first major challenger in 2021, going on to platform the likes of Yuta and Daniel Garcia as equals if not successors to his mantle, and his last act as a full-time wrestler saw his character killed off for the benefit of Moxley and the BCC as they become the premier heels in the company. When you zoom out of his run in its entirety, it seems like this was the way it was always going to go. To walk out of Tacoma with the title was to do something Danielson had yet to manage in AEW — beating Jon Moxley — and it just proved to be too much for him. Moxley played the role of Ivan Drago, and Danielson was Apollo Creed; time will tell who turns out to be Rocky.

Written by Max Everett

Not only was Darby Allin the first to make the save as the BCC sought to finish Danielson off, but while Danielson was being wheeled out of his farewell bout on a gurney, the camera remained fixated on delivering Allin's reaction to proceedings like he was the protagonist and Danielson was just a means of establishing Allin's vengeance arc.

To be clear: Bryan Danielson won the world title in a WrestleMania main event purely because of his connection to the audience, had to overcome a litany of serious injuries that had forced him into retirement, finally won his first AEW title after betting on himself three years ago — and his retirement was book-ended for the sake of putting one of the overhyped "Pillars" into the limelight. Why not let Danielson have his moment, as sombre as it may have been, or let Moxley have his as the new champion? Why have Yuta turn on Allin before turning on Bryan? Doesn't it seem like Allin was Hulk Hogan'd into a spot he didn't belong?

Like many things I take issue with in AEW, it's a lack of narrative cohesion in the structuring that grinds my teeth. Yuta coming out to make the save, that makes sense. Yuta turning on Danielson, that makes sense. What doesn't make sense is putting someone who doesn't have any pre-existing storyline ties to Danielson nor the BCC, and only barely one with Moxley, as the would-be savior of the moment. Posting the shot of Allin watching without context and you would have thought he was watching Sting get carted away (someone he actually had ties with) but in this case it just broke things for me.

There are a plethora of options that make sense both as an antithesis to Moxley and a spirit of vengeance for Danielson. Eddie Kingston is one example, the former best friend of Moxley driven into conflict by his long-standing issues with Claudio Castagnoli, and a man that legitimately worked for the mutual respect of Danielson shown earlier this year. Daniel Garcia is another one, having shown genuine remorse for never accepting Danielson's invite to the BCC, and someone that should really have an issue with the way his idol was retired. In fact, trying to make the story logical and not merely a delivery mechanism for the manufactured ascent of Allin would surely bring to light a whole host of viable alternatives.

To extend the Rocky comparison, this is the equivalent of having Tommy Gun step up to Drago. If that doesn't make sense to you, congratulations; that's my point.

Written by Max Everett