A match I was actually looking forward to before this Coronavirus issue put a stop to pretty much everything was AEW’s “Blood and Guts” version of War Games with Jericho and his inner circle taking on Cody and the Elite. They had been leading up to the episode of Wednesday Night Dynamite and I was all ready to see the 10 guys beat the slobber out of each other.
Then came the Coronavirus and put a halt to that happening.
Now I’m not the biggest fan of AEW. I think they have a lot to do differently to improve their product. At the same time, I will admit these last few weeks without any fans in the arenas, they have actually put on a better show. But in the downtime with shows in empty arenas, I got to thinking, Is Blood and Guts better suited for a pay per view than an episode of Dynamite?
Doing a match like that would be a big episode of Dynamite. No doubt that a match like that would bring in a big audience on TV. Hopefully, they would be able to keep those people during the whole show and not do something stupid to screw everything up like have one team slip on a bunch of banana peels or something goofy like that. But it also brings up the limits of doing it on a TV episode.
A match like that can’t be a quick one. If they did try to make it quicker it would ruin the match. However, what kind of commercial breaks would be going on during the show? I’d hate to have a main event like that interrupted because we need to know about dog food or denture cream or whoever they got to put money into this.
Another point is what they would be allowed to do on TNT? This might not be as major of a problem with TNT letting them say pretty much whatever they want. It seems kind of stupid to get the censor when the crowd starts chanting something in “adult language” and then have one of the champions come out and say the same thing and not get edited. Now what kind of editing would TNT put on the crowd or the wrestlers during a match like that? It doesn’t seem like an issue to a Pay Per View audience does it?
And then there is the show itself. TNT would give the match 2 hours. A good chunk of that would probably be the Blood and Guts match itself while most of the rest of the show would be whomever they could scatch up for undercard matches. If they went with a pay per view for the show, it would probably be a 3-hour show with over 2 hours being for the undercard and then topping it off with the Blood and Guts match. The undercard matches might be a little wonky, but in a pay per view format, they could have more time to get things straightened out.
Another aspect of this is the business of the show. Is whatever money they would make from advertisers and whatever on TNT the same as they would get from pay per view buyers? I don’t know the details of how that works out NOW let alone if they tried something like making Blood and Guts a pay per view show on its own.
But the coronavirus and the wishes of the government putting the squash on getting crowds of people together for a show like that (either for TNT of for Pay per View). It is something I will have to wonder about until things pass and AEW is allowed to do a show like that, no matter how they do it. No matter what a match like that doesn’t need to be in an empty arena in front of nobody.
