CM Punk Vs. Jon Moxley Reportedly Still Set As AEW All Out Main Event

AEW’s All Out main event is going to look quite familiar.

According to both the Wrestling Observer and Fightful Select (h/t WrestlingNews.co), Jon Moxley vs. CM Punk is still slated to headline next month’s pay-per-view despite Moxley’s surprisingly lopsided victory over Punk on this week’s episode of Dynamite: “Punk is not injured and the plan is still for Moxley vs. Punk at All Out. It was also reported that Moxley didn’t like the original plans for the pay-per-view and he pitched what happened” on Dynamite.

Punk has been at the center of major backstage drama in AEW and only recently returned from ankle surgery, so the widespread assumption was that his quick loss to Moxley in Wednesday’s world title unification match meant one of two things: Either Punk isn’t fully recovered from his injury, or there was more to his defeat than meets the eye.

As it turns out, however, Moxley’s big victory was just an unexpected storyline swerve in route to a rematch at All Out. The question is: Why book such a big match to end so quickly if there are plans in place to run that match back in just over a week?

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Maybe it’s because AEW Dynamite’s audience simply isn’t growing, despite the additions of Punk, Adam Cole, Bryan Danielson and numerous other top stars over the past years. Perhaps AEW President Tony Khan, seeing WWE hit its stride and boost its ratings in the process, wanted a controversial talking point coming out of Dynamite and a one-week viewership boost, which is exactly what he got. Maybe—and this is surely the best-case scenario—Moxley decimated Punk in such shocking fashion because it’s part of a bigger plan.

That’s the hope and the optimist’s glass-half-full approach, at least, and AEW does deserve the benefit of the doubt when it comes to questions about its storylines. One thing AEW has excelled at in its brief history is long-term storytelling, and given all of the marquee stars who are affected by what goes down with the AEW World Championship and the way that title has been booked since its inception, there is little reason to doubt that Punk vs. Moxley is being done once again at All Out to set the stage for something bigger down the road. Perhaps a Punk heel turn—and cheap victory over Moxley at All Out—is the way to go.

Does it feel rushed? Of course, and that in and of itself is a change from AEW’s typical slow-build mentality and is also one of the reasons why fans aren’t so sure what’s going on in AEW’s main event scene right now. Punk is legitimately beefing with former AEW Champion Adam “Hangman” Page and seems to be at the forefront of a chaotic environment backstage not long after feuding with MJF, who is reportedly returning soon in a move that could very well be linked to the Punk-Moxley finish on Dynamite.

It looked like the path was made for MJF to return on Dynamite and confront the winner of the title unification match—assumed by many to be Punk—in order to reignite Punk vs. MJF at All Out. Who knows? Maybe that’s still the plan, and it’s been pushed down the road a bit. But even though AEW’s successes with long-term payoffs, such as Wardlow turning on MJF, are well-documented, this is perhaps the first time that most of the chatter around AEW seems to be negative.

Now, AEW is faced with an even tougher task made tougher by its doing: Trying to drum up more interest in Moxley vs. Punk—which is slated as “the main event” of the show—not even two weeks after it happened on TV with Punk looking like he was nowhere near ready to compete with Moxley due to his injury. Even though AEW has often done a masterful job of booking worked-shoot-type storylines that blend the elements of the real and the scripted, are fans supposed to buy into the idea that Punk is suddenly recovered enough to beat a man who just destroyed him 11 days early?

That’s a hard sell for AEW, especially with the way its pay-per-view model works. This isn’t WWE, which is getting its Peacock money from NBCUniversal regardless of the quality of its shows. This is AEW, where matches matter in terms of selling pay-per-views, and this is All Out, which last year generated more than 200,000 buys—easily the most in AEW history—with Punk wrestling his first PPV match in seven years.

AEW is clearly relying heavily on Punk to sell All Out once again this year, and a title unification match against Moxley, at least on paper, sounds like a surefire way to make All Out a rousing success. But with so much controversy surrounding AEW as of late, its overall quality down and Punk vs. Moxley just taking place, doing that match again so soon after Punk looked like a shell of himself is, at best, a very hard sell.