Wait, what is Produce?
AEW is heading to Brooklyn for a show titled Produce, which sounds like someone pulled a random word out of a hat at a catering table. It is streaming on MyAEW.com, and look, I love a good wrestling show as much as the next guy, but the branding on this one is baffling. You have a massive roster, you have prime real estate in the Barclays Center, and you go with a name that makes me check if I accidentally wandered into a grocery store aisle.
We have confirmed reports that the event is set to drop later this month. If they think they can just slap a random noun on a card and expect the Brooklyn crowd to treat it like a major event, they might want to double-check their market research. Brooklyn fans are the kind of people who will let you know exactly what they think of your booking midway through the opening contest.
The streaming strategy is a head-scratcher
Pushing this exclusively to MyAEW.com is the real gamble here. Everyone already has a dozen subscriptions eating their bank account, so asking fans to navigate to a new site for a one-off event is a heavy lift. We have seen streaming experiments fail in this industry with much bigger hype machines behind them. It feels like a glorified house show masquerading as a premium special.
If the plan is to use this as a proving ground for younger guys to get minutes, that is fine. But putting it behind a separate digital wall feels like a mistake for a promotion that needs eyes on its product. You either make it accessible, or you make the card so stacked that people have no choice but to pay up. Anything in the middle is just dead air.
Booking concerns for the big city
Brooklyn should be treated as a destination, not a fly-through spot for an experimental name. When you take a show to the Northeast, there is a certain level of grittiness and technical excellence expected. If this ends up being a bunch of squash matches and repetitive tag team action, the fans sitting in those expensive seats are going to turn on it within the first 20 minutes.
There is also the fatigue factor. We are in the middle of a massive sports calendar with the World Cup kicking off today, and now they want us to focus on something called Produce? It feels like the promotional team skipped a meeting or three. I want this to succeed because wrestling is always better when companies are swinging for the fences, but swinging for a grocery store index is just bizarre. Let us hope the actual wrestling delivers, because the wrap on this event is already coming off the rotisserie chicken.
