All Elite Wrestling’s Jon Moxley was recently a special guest on the Throwing Down With Renee & Miesha Podcast in which the former AEW World Champion and his wife, Renee Paquette, talked with Meisha Tate about why she hasn’t fully embraced the world of pro wrestling. Moxley was sympathetic towards Tate’s point of view, given her extensive background in the world of MMA and the choreographed nature of pro wrestling, but then explained how fans suspend their belief just like when they watch any film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
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“In the 60s or 70s they were actually trying to fool people into thinking this was real. And bad guys and good guys couldn’t ride in the same car or be seen at the bar together, the business was very protected,” Moxley explained. “And you were actually trying to fool people into (thinking) these are real fights. That is not the case in 2021. There’s real fighting, which is what you do, and there’s this. And fans are very passionate about it, but nobody is being fooled into thinking their watching a legitimate thing, that’s a completely separate sport now. It’s like the Marvel Universe. In real life, nobody can shoot f—ing spiderwebs out of their fings or whatever. But in the Marvel Universe, there’s a guy who can. That’s accepted. So when he shoots somebody in the face with a spiderweb, Spider-Man, you totally accept it.”
Moxley is far from the first pro wrestling to make the comparison between the business and The MCU. Even Tony Khan, AEW’s president, sees the similarities.
“One of the great things [Marvel does] is they really care about what their audience wants, and they go out of their way to hear their fans,” Khan told CBR last November. “And I think that’s what I try to do with AEW and we all have made our mission with AEW is to give a wrestling show that was giving the fans what they were missing in wrestling. I think we’ve carved out a great space for ourselves, similar to Marvel.
“Obviously, I’d love to have the kind of mainstream success they’ve had. But within the world of wrestling, we’ve been extremely successful,” he added. “And in the mainstream, we are very successful. I mean, we’ve got a top TV show. Since the news has dominated really the last eight-plus months, we’ve always consistently been in the top five non-news shows, often number one or number two, and that is great mainstream success. I’d like to get even bigger, and Marvel is a great company to try and aspire to be like them.” Khan ended by saying, “I would absolutely take that comparison all day.”
