AEW continued its winning run with another solid pay-per-view as AEW Forbidden Door 2025 came to London’s O2 Arena for the first time on Sunday — wrapping up with a chaotic, Stampede-style match that managed to honor local hero Will Ospreay and the departing Hiroshi Tanahashi while still offering plenty of gasps along the way.
As good as the show was, though, it’s hard to shake the feeling that the actual Forbidden Door gimmick felt a bit flat this time around. Not least as pretty much every cross-promotional match took place earlier on in the evening, and often with quite predictable finishes. (Was Nigel McGuiness ever really going to beat Zack Sabre Jr.?)
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The NJPW/CMLL/Stardom matches didn’t disappoint, particularly with the four-way women’s showdown for the TBS title. But it still felt undermined by what came afterward, with the second half of Sunday’s card playing out much more like a conventional AEW pay-per-view than a multi-promotion extravaganza.
Don’t get me wrong: That’s no bad thing. AEW founder Tony Khan has been putting on some of the best shows of his career recently, and you sensed the sell-out crowd in London would have chosen a hot-as-ever MJF vs. AEW World Champion Hangman Adam Page match one hundred times out of one hundred over the more niche offerings that have taken place at past Forbidden Door events.
Jon Moxley, Marina Shafir and the Death Riders played yet another big role in a successful AEW pay-per-view. (Ricky Havlik, AEW)
(Ricky Havlik)
The show also helped put the wheels in motion for the next phase of the AEW story, including positioning Will Ospreay perfectly for his eventual comeback and likely triumph at All In 2026. Elsewhere, we had surprise returns in the form of Wardlow and Jamie Hayter, and the confirmation that Cope and Christian Cage have officially joined forces.
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Then there was the main event: A hectic crossover between AEW’s established Stadium Stampede format and the old WCW WarGames, which managed the impressive feat of breathing new life into the Death Riders angle (thanks, in part, to another spectacularly gross stunt from Jon Moxley and Darby Allin).
Ironically, given the whole Forbidden Door gimmick, the spiciest cross-promotional drama came not from any of the actual matches on Sunday, but instead from the bombshell announcement from AEW’s Tony Schiavone that Forbidden Door 2025 managed to draw the largest-ever wrestling crowd at the O2 Arena, with 18,992 fans in attendance — just edging WWE’s previous record from two years earlier.
It’s a narrow margin admittedly, and probably the sort of thing that no casual fan would give a second thought to. But given the strategy pursued by WWE toward its primary competitor in recent weeks, you have to imagine that those extra 1,000 or so seats (according to verified numbers) felt particularly sweet for Khan.
After all, it was only this week that WWE confirmed it’ll be running a Wrestlepalooza revival on the same night as AEW’s All Out — the latest example of the big boys deliberately scheduling their events to run at the same time as AEW’s pay-per-views, presumably in an attempt to put a dent in the latter’s buyrates.
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Sure, it’s true that AEW has always been able to draw an outsized crowd in the UK, partly due to the fact that its tickets are much more affordable than WWE’s. An uncharitable reading could even ask whether AEW’s past massive crowds at Wembley Stadium really made much difference to their overall health as a promotion.
But all of that sensible analysis would still miss the point. As petty as it feels to be comparing crowd sizes, it’s worth remembering that it wasn’t AEW who started this pettiness. Just look at all the drama around WWE programming not one, but three (3!) separate events to take the shine off AEW’s big All In: Texas weekend back in July.
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Given those circumstances, maybe we shouldn’t begrudge Khan a bit of smug satisfaction at how everything played out — particularly given WWE reportedly made it part of its own contract with the O2 Arena (which hosted “WWE Raw” earlier this year) that the London fixture would not promote any rival wrestling shows until after WWE’s event was done and dusted.
On the other hand, perhaps AEW’s owner would be better off keeping his mind on the day job. We’ve seen now from three back-to-back-to-back AEW pay-per-views — Double or Nothing, All In: Texas, and now Forbidden Door — that AEW thrives when it sticks to what it does best: Namely, superb bell-to-bell matches with a solid and reliable roster.
For all the drama elsewhere, that was the big lesson that we can draw from this year’s Forbidden Door — but that doesn’t mean anyone will be forgetting that 18,992 number any time soon.
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