AEW Hints at WarGames Match, Shot at Vince McMahon With New Trademark Filings

All Elite Wrestling recently filed for two new trademarks, both of which could point at what the company has planned for the near future — "The Match Beyond" and "AEW Blood and Guts." There's a lot to unpack with both, starting with how "The Match Beyond" was once used as the nickname for the famous WarGames match used in WCW starting in 1987. While WWE owns the trademark to the WarGames name and has been using it as an annual staple of the NXT TakeOver schedule since 2017, AEW might have just found their own way to use the dual-ring cage match for its own events.

"The Match Beyond" refers to the final stage of each WarGames match, when all competitors had entered the cage and a metal roof had been lowered. WWE's version has altered the match so there is no roof.

Back in early October Rhodes explained in a media conference call that he liked the idea of buying back the WarGames trademark from WWE, given that his father Dusty Rhodes created the match concept.

"I really just want to buy it back," Rhodes said. "I wonder if they would let me buy it back because Dusty thought of the match concept on a napkin in a parking lot. Arn Anderson was there, I got a witness. The one they do now isn't truly loyal to the old school rules of it. Maybe I can get it back. The beauty of that is that WarGames came out of the experience of being around wrestling, seeing The Horsemen build up, seeing the good guys and their adversaries and all of a sudden, the light bulb went off. Hopefully, a match comes to us the same way."

Meanwhile "Blood and Guts" is in reference to some harsh criticism Vince McMahon lobbed at the young promotion during an investors conference call earlier this year.

"We just haven't come anywhere close, actually, to going to another level," McMahon said. "There will be something we do in terms of a direction of content — more controversy, better storylines, etc. But at the same time, we're not gonna go back to the quote 'Attitude Era,' and we're not gonna do blood and guts and things of that nature, such as being done on perhaps a new potential competitor."

McMahon later claimed that WWE would provide a "more sophisticated product" compared to AEW. Since launching on TNT on Oct. 2, AEW Dynamite has consistently beaten WWE's NXT show in television ratings.