AEW x NJPW Forbidden Door I makes the impossible possible in Chicago
Four years ago tonight, the United Center hosted something that genuinely felt impossible when Tony Khan first started writing checks in 2019. Forbidden Door wasn’t just a crossover show — it was proof of concept for a vision of wrestling that the industry had been told was structurally impossible, that contractual walls and corporate rivalries had made permanent. The card delivered in a way that exceeded the hype cycle that preceded it: Okada and Punk in the main event in Chicago, in front of a crowd that understood exactly what it was watching, with the kind of atmospheric electricity that United Center hadn’t generated since the Attitude Era was still a recent memory rather than a nostalgia product. When Punk’s music hit and that building combusted, it wasn’t just a hometown pop — it was the sound of a fanbase being vindicated.
The undercard is where Forbidden Door I made its real argument. Will Ospreay and Adam Cole delivered the kind of match that reminded you why the “forbidden” framing had weight — these were performers operating in stylistic dialects that had been kept apart, and the collision produced something genuinely new rather than a greatest-hits package. Jay White’s presence threaded through the card like a connective tissue, a man already positioning himself as the binding agent between both companies’ power structures. The show wasn’t flawless — the booking logic around certain title stipulations felt muddled in the moment — but the overall architecture held, and it held because the talent refused to let the occasion be wasted. Tanahashi on that stage, in that context, was a statement about what professional wrestling’s international history actually meant when treated with seriousness.
What Forbidden Door I seeded was the uncomfortable truth that AEW’s highest ceiling required a partner — that the promotion was most itself when it was reaching outward rather than consolidating inward, which is a complicated legacy for a company that spent its first years arguing it could stand alone.
