AEW X NJPW Forbidden Door 2023: 3 Biggest Winners And 3 Biggest Losers
Another year, another trip through the Forbidden Door. The second AEW x NJPW crossover show had some tremendous highs and some questionable lows, but ultimately seemed to send fans home happy, with numerous crowd-pleasing moments and several unimpeachable matches. Still there has never yet been a wrestling show that ended with everyone on a higher level than they were before, and there are always some stars that are clearly on the rise while others appear to be on the decline. Such is the nature of pro graps.
Much of this shifting in status is the product of chaos, and with over a dozen contests on this year's Forbidden Door lineup, there was plenty of chaos — and that means plenty of winners and plenty of losers. But who were they? Now that the dust has cleared, here are the three biggest winners and the three biggest losers from Sunday's cross-promotional extravaganza.
Winner: Satoshi Kojima
Ahead of Forbidden Door, rumors swirled about the possibility of CM Punk facing NJPW Strong Openweight Champion KENTA, but those plans quickly fell through. Enter Satoshi Kojima. Despite losing in his opening round match in the Owen Hart Cup, Kojima was one of the big winners on Sunday.
Thanks in no small part to CM Punk's less-than-stellar reputation in Canada heading into Forbidden Door, Kojima was given one of the biggest babyface reactions in his career by the Toronto crowd. Where many would have rested on the crowd response alone, the 30-plus-year veteran delivered a memorable performance, going toe-to-toe with the former ROH Champion and even delivering an elbow drop to Punk's nether region that few will soon forget. Kojima's inclusion in the high-profile bout was a testament to the benefits of aging unproblematically and getting along with people.
It's been a long time since Kojima was in the main event scene in New Japan Pro-Wrestling, and despite a brief run with the GHC Heavyweight Championship in Pro Wrestling NOAH last year, the Bread Club Leader is becoming something of an elder statesman in the sport, making the boisterous welcome he received from the Forbidden Door crowd all the sweeter — one last chance to bring the house down for the Japanese legend.
Loser: SANADA
IWGP World Heavyweight Champion SANADA defended his title on Sunday, but the world championship match felt like an afterthought by the time it was over.
SANADA defended against AEW "pillar" Jungle Boy in a match that already suffered from both men admitting that they had no idea who the other was. Then the world title contest was slotted unceremoniously in the middle of the program. Nonetheless, SANADA battered Jungle Boy in a relatively dominant victory, flattening Jack Perry with a moonsault and retaining his championship. As soon as SANADA left the ring, however, the outcome was immediately overshadowed by the post-match fallout, which saw Jungle Boy attack his friend and tag partner HOOK in frustration.
SANADA already has trouble being perceived as "the guy," as so much of his time in NJPW was spent losing, leading many to worry he'd become a failed experiment. Now that SANADA is finally world champion, his matches have been solid and his opponents popular, and SANADA has begun carrying himself with a bit more gravitas, but moments like Sunday do the champion no favors, as he was relegated to a brief title defense that was merely a vehicle for his opponent's character development — character development that SANADA desperately needs himself.
Winner: Sickos
Forbidden Door was — for better and for worse — a night of bad taste, with some wrestlers going to extra lengths to shock and concern fans. The show featured a slew of questionable choices that seemed tailor-made to provoke wrestling fans with gentler sensibilities, making for a great night for the sickos in the Scotiabank Arena.
Take Will Ospreay's brutal bout with Kenny Omega, for instance. Ospreay and Omega took each other to their physical limits in a bloody 40-minute affair, but towards the end of the bout, Ospreay cinched in a Crippler Crossface, the infamous finishing maneuver of Chris Benoit, a choice made even grimmer by Ospreay using the move so close to the 16th anniversary of the horrific double murder-suicide that rocked the professional wrestling world in 2007. Ospreay seemed to relish the "You sick f***" chants the submission hold received from the crowd.
If dark callbacks to the Benoit tragedy weren't enough, later in the night, Bryan Danielson took a moment during his main event match against Kazuchika Okada to reference his own longstanding history with concussion issues, convulsing on the ground after a hard hit, much to the concern of viewers and fans in attendance. Danielson, who plays a heel character in AEW, was thankfully playing possum, goading Okada into letting his guard down, but the moment was nonetheless another over-the-top moment of bad taste, that fans — and likely Danielson's own wife and child — could've done without.
Loser: MJF
There were seemingly two matches on Sunday that were built around two wrestlers determining who was "the best in the world" — and neither of them involved the AEW World Champion, who instead spent the opening contest struggling to defeat the ghost of a great wrestler.
It might be blasphemy to say it, but Hiroshi Tanahashi is not the wrestler he once was. At 46 years old, his body is betraying him, and he has lost more than one step in his quest to compete at the level longtime fans expect of him. Because of this, MJF gained nothing on Sunday by beating him, and less than nothing by having to cheat to win against the shell of the former IWGP Heavyweight Champion.
MJF wore a robe that read "New Japan is an indie," as there is no greater insult to MJF than independent wrestling, but the bitter irony is that nothing evokes the image of independent wrestling more than an old beaten-down veteran doing his best to give a young champion a win, lending the young upstart what little credibility they have left as their glory fades. Yes, MJF technically defended the title, and yes he beat a bonafide legend, but his title reign has struggled for legitimacy in recent weeks, and it doesn't take a keen eye to see that his match with Tanahashi wasn't what it could've been even a year ago. Like fellow world champion SANADA, MJF faces a serious perception issue.
Winner: Europe (and therefore everyone)
Tony Khan is the kind of rich that most people — including the author of this piece — will never understand, but between his personal wealth, a fruitful relationship with Warner Bros Discovery, and 60,000+ tickets sold for All In at Wembley Stadium, Khan found himself sitting on even more money than usual, and the AEW CEO spent a significant portion of it on an extravagance that made all the difference. At Forbidden Door, "The America Dragon" Bryan Danielson once again walked to the ring to the tune of Europe's "The Final Countdown," his iconic entrance music from his time in Ring of Honor, much to the delight of both fans in attendance and Danielson himself.
Khan's willingness to license hit songs has always been something that helped the presentation of AEW, a breath of fresh air from WWE's increasingly homogenized theme music, and the use of "Final Countdown" helped push the dream match main event of Danielosn vs. Kazuchika Okada from simple fantasy booking to something surreal and dreamlike. The asking price for the song was so astronomical that it felt like an impossibility, according to Khan, who admitted in the post-show press scrum that he paid a pretty penny to make the impossible possible. Without going into specifics, Khan said the one-time use of the song cost him as much as a new talent, but the expense was 100% worth it.
Loser: The concept of world championships
As previously mentioned, there were two matches built around being "the best in the world." Only one of those two matches was for a title — and even that title was ultimately secondary to a bitter game of one-upmanship.
Will Ospreay and Kenny Omega technically wrestled for the IWGP United States Heavyweight Championship, but much like their Wrestle Kingdom match, the story of the match was Ospreay's blinding obsession with being better than Omega; the US title is merely window dressing. Meanwhile,throughout the main event match between Bryan Danielson and Kazuchika Okada, announcer Kevin Kelly said repeatedly that the match was not for a championship, but for the "title" of being the best wrestler in the world — it is, quite frankly, a grievous error that the two wrestlers vying for "best in the world" were not also vying for a world championship. SANADA and MJF might be world champions, but they're not Kazuchika Okada, Bryan Danielson, Kenny Omega, or Will Ospreay, and that is simply too long a list of people.
To truly twist the knife further, Okada is the man SANADA took the IWGP World Heavyweight Championship from in the first place. While Bryan Danielson was sitting at press scrums saying he tapped out Okada with a fractured forearm, SANADA is wearing actual proof that he also defeated "The Rainmaker" — yet commentary barely made mention of this fact. In fact, both Danielson and Okada have lost to their respective world champions this year, as MJF successfully defended his title against Bryan Danielson in an Iron Man Match at AEW Revolution earlier this year.
The result of all this is that AEW and NJPW are both exiting Forbidden Door season with an image problem. They've taken chances on new faces of their respective promotions, but both these men risk becoming paper champions, as it feels like they've yet to break into the upper echelon (as Ospreay might say) and Forbidden Door only highlighted that fact further.