AEW x NJPW Forbidden Door 2 delivers another inter-promotional landmark
Three years ago tonight, the United Centre in Chicago became the loudest argument anyone had made in years for what professional wrestling could be when ambition and execution actually aligned. Forbidden Door 2 wasn’t just a better show than its predecessor β it was a statement of intent, a card built with the kind of surgical confidence that comes from two promotions who’d done this before and knew exactly where to push harder. The atmosphere in that building had an edge to it that pure AEW shows rarely matched, partly because the crowd knew they were watching something with a shelf life, something that couldn’t be taken for granted, and partly because Chicago was always going to show up differently for a card that had CM Punk’s name on it.
MJF and Samoa Joe tearing each other apart for the ROH Championship was the kind of match that reminded you what Joe had always been capable of when booked against someone who matched his intensity rather than absorbed it. But the real weight of the night sat in the main event, where Okada and Punk β on what turned out to be borrowed time for both of them in their respective roles β delivered something that felt genuinely historic rather than just important. SANADA and Ospreay were doing work on that card that the broader American audience was still catching up to, and the whole show functioned as a living argument that the talent ceiling in professional wrestling in 2023 was absurdly, almost embarrassingly high.
What Forbidden Door 2 seeded, whether anyone in power was paying attention or not, was proof that inter-promotional collaboration didn’t dilute either brand β it elevated both, and it gave wrestlers a stage where the stakes felt different, less manufactured, more earned. The events that followed, the contractual chaos, the departures, the collapsed relationships between AEW and NJPW that made a third Forbidden Door feel increasingly unlikely, stripped that goodwill down faster than it deserved. Three years on, that night in Chicago stands as the high-water mark of a specific, unrepeatable moment in the industry, and the fact that nothing has genuinely replaced it tells you everything about how rarely conditions like that actually come together.