Gorilla Position — Week of May 29, 2026

Cody Rhodes Called His Shot Before He Even Knew He Was Calling It

Cody Rhodes told The Rich Eisen Show this week that his 2016 WWE exit was “a very big bluff” — one that only hardened into reality once the crowd decided to believe in it. That is an extraordinary thing to admit publicly, and it reframes the entire American Nightmare mythology in a way that is somehow more compelling than the cleaned-up version. He did not leave with a grand plan. He left with a gamble and the self-awareness to let the audience tell him whether it was working. Most wrestlers who spend years building an independent legacy quietly imply they always knew where they were headed. Rhodes is saying the opposite: the destination only became real because you, the fan, made it real. For someone currently sitting at the top of WWE’s card, that is a remarkably human thing to say, and it explains why his connection with the audience has always felt less manufactured than almost anyone else at his level. The bluff landed. Not many do.

The NJPW Sale Is the Most Consequential Story in Wrestling Nobody Is Talking About Loudly Enough

Bushiroad selling all of its New Japan Pro-Wrestling shares to TV Asahi and CyberAgent is not a footnote — it is a tectonic shift. Bushiroad bought NJPW in 2012 and presided over what became the most critically celebrated run in the company’s history, building a global fanbase on the back of the Elite, the Bullet Club, and some of the finest in-ring work the industry has produced. TV Asahi is a major Japanese broadcast network. CyberAgent is a tech and media conglomerate. This is no longer an eccentric card game company running a wrestling promotion out of passion — this is corporate Japanese media consolidating around a property they clearly see as strategically valuable. What that means for creative direction, for the foreign talent pipeline, and for NJPW’s relationship with western audiences is genuinely unknown right now, and that uncertainty deserves far more scrutiny than it is getting. The Bushiroad era is over. Whatever comes next does not have a name yet.

Netflix in Japan Is the Logical Next Move, and It Should Worry AEW

Reporting from Dave Meltzer this week suggests WWE is expected to land on Netflix in Japan as AEW prepares to depart NJPW World following the ownership change. This is not a surprising development so much as it is an inevitable one, and the timing could not be more pointed. AEW built much of its credibility in Japan through its relationship with NJPW — Forbidden Door became a genuine marquee event precisely because it put the two rosters together on the same card. With that partnership now structurally weakened by the Bushiroad exit and AEW losing its streaming home in Japan, the promotional footprint that Tony Khan spent years constructing in the country is shrinking at exactly the moment WWE is expanding its. Netflix has demonstrated it takes its WWE relationship seriously. Extending that into Japan, one of the most wrestling-literate markets on earth, is a smart play. For AEW, losing Japan as a reliable second base is a problem that does not have an obvious short-term fix.

AEW Double or Nothing Was Genuinely Good and the Industry Is Better For It

It is worth pausing on this: AEW Double or Nothing 2026 is reportedly tracking toward a top-five or top-six all-time AEW pay-per-view performance, and by all accounts the Queens crowd was fully invested from start to finish. In a climate where it has become fashionable in some corners to write AEW’s obituary every few months, a legitimate big-show success matters. The promotion has real problems — the streaming situation in Japan being one, the ongoing challenge of converting casual interest into consistent viewership being another — but a sold-out New York crowd going home happy and a pay-per-view number that reflects genuine demand is not nothing. It is easy to contextualise AEW purely against WWE’s scale and declare it a perpetual underperformer. The more honest framing is that there is a promotion running shows that serious wrestling fans are choosing to spend money on, and that has value independent of the comparison. Forbidden Door season is coming. The card is taking shape. The interest is there.

The Lesnar-Femi Situation Deserves More Than Eric Bischoff Dismissing It as Clunky

Eric Bischoff said this week that the Brock Lesnar versus Oba Femi booking is “clunky as hell” and that WWE should have let Lesnar retire after WrestleMania 42. He is not entirely wrong about the execution, but he is missing what the story is actually trying to do. Oba Femi pinned Brock Lesnar at WrestleMania 42. That is an enormous statement about who WWE believes in as a future cornerstone. Giving Lesnar a rematch is not the story — the story is whether Femi can beat him again, in a different context, with the weight of expectation now fully on his shoulders rather than the surprise of the upset. The problem is that if WWE has fumbled the connective tissue between those two moments, then yes, it reads as contractual obligation rather than compelling narrative. The booking around it matters enormously. Bischoff is right that it has felt laboured. He is wrong that the solution was to leave Femi’s WrestleMania moment as a standalone rather than building on it. You do not generate a new star by winning once and then disappearing.