Cincinnati deserved better than this Collision card
Look, I love the energy of a packed Cincinnati crowd as much as the next guy, but the AEW Collision Summer Blockbuster taped on June 11th and aired on June 13th? It was less of a blockbuster and more of a box office bomb. You walk into the Andrew J Brady Music Center expecting a spectacle, and instead, you get a show that felt like it was booked in the dark.
We need to talk about the pacing. Taping on a Thursday and airing on a Saturday isn't the problem—the industry has done that since the days of WCW Saturday Night—but the air was clearly sucked out of the room by whoever decided the sequence of these bouts.
The booking vacuum is real
When you have a roster this bloated, you should at least be able to string together a coherent narrative. Instead, we got a series of contests that felt entirely detached from whatever is supposed to be happening on the landscape of the tag team division or the international title picture. It’s hard to get invested in a mid-card scramble when it feels like a mandatory check-box exercise.
The move list was there, sure. We saw plenty of high-impact strikes and decent technical transitions. But a move without a story is just a guy doing gymnastics for five hundred bucks.
Where is the killer instinct?
The biggest issue with the June 13th episode was the lack of stakes. In an era where every promotion is fighting for eyeballs, you cannot afford to waste airtime on matches that have the urgency of a Tuesday morning board meeting. If your top acts aren't pushing for something tangible, why should the viewer bother clicking on HBO Max?
I'm not asking for a cage match every single week, but I am asking for a reason to care. Wrestling is effectively a soap opera for people who like to see guys get powerbombed through tables. If you take away the soap opera, you’re just left with guys bruising their ribs for no reason, and that’s a tough sell by the 10:45 PM mark.
There was a distinct lack of heat in the segments that were supposed to be our main draws. We had talented workers, but they were effectively wrestling in a vacuum. It reminds me of those mid-2000s mid-card bouts that existed solely to fill the gaps between the actual stars. That isn't how you keep an audience hooked in a 2026 market.
The Verdict
AEW has all the talent in the world. They have the budget. They have the airtime. What they don't seem to have right now is a consistent vision for what the Saturday night show is actually *for*. Is it an experimental ground? Is it the B-show? Is it the third act of a larger story? Right now, it’s just noise.
Maybe they should spend less time on fancy graphics and more time figuring out why the audience is starting to sound bored by the third hour. If you don't fix the trajectory of these shows, the Nielsen ratings aren't going to be the only thing dropping; the patience of the hardcore fan base is already stretched thin.
We all saw the tape results hit the internet before the broadcast even started, and that’s fine, but if the content itself doesn't offer a 5-star hook, why watch the replay? They need to stop coasting on the reputation of the roster and start sweating the details again.
