AEW x NJPW Forbidden Door preview & predictions: A Ring of Endless Light
There is a version of this conversation, and a full column really, that is purely in memoriam — mourning for what Forbidden Door used to be, for the electric novelty of that first time, for the sense that any match – that anything – was possible.
Something like this did not happen in modern wrestling. Companies never reached across the aisle, attempting to better both sides. It was always bitter and contemptuous, zero sum by design with every gain measured against what it cost the competition.
That’s what made the Forbidden Door concept so exciting. In addition to dream matches, we were able to think of rosters without borders, a true free market of professional wrestling at a global scale. The Forbidden Door is still open, technically. It’s just that fewer people are walking through it each year, and the ones who do are increasingly familiar faces.
The excitement and novelty were never going to last. Nothing does and this premise is not exempt. The real conversation is about what Forbidden Door is now, stripped of the original premise, evaluated on its own terms as a standard PPV. And evaluated on its own terms, this card is fine. It is a competent AEW pay-per-view with a handful of compelling matches, though they all involve the full-time AEW roster.
At a minimum, its future warrants a rethink and possible reimagining of what cross promotional “dream matches” really are in 2026. But that’s for another day. Let’s get to previewing and predicting tonight’s main card (as of Saturday morning, anyway).
AEW x NJPW Forbidden Door 2026 predictions
Young Bucks (Matt & Nick Jackson) vs. El Sky Team (Mistico & Mascara Dorada) vs. Unbound Co. (Shingo Takagi & Titan)
This is a match keeping the spirit of Forbidden Door alive. This is really the only place a match like this could happen, and is destined to be a feast for the eyes. Twelve minutes with the safety all the way off. Heck, don’t even have tags. Just do every possible thing in every way possible. Light the crowd up and force the next match to keep up. No one is better in matches like this than the Young Bucks, and few are more exciting than Dorada. Let these cats show out and show off.
Prediction: El Sky Team
Will Ospreay vs. Swerve Strickland in the men’s Owen Hart Foundation tournament finals
This is a match with real, proper juice and a deep shared history between two performers who have rarely, if ever, failed to deliver when the lights are brightest. Their 2024 Forbidden Door meeting was exactly the kind of match this show used to promise and deliver on. Even with both now under the AEW banner, this should be no different.
Ospreay has the neon flashing sign above his head at this point; the full protagonist treatment, week after week, pointed directly at Wembley. There is no mystery about where this is going. The outcome isn’t the question. The question is what is the physical toll this match will take on silly William?
The more interesting thread, and the one worth pulling, involves Swerve. Where does a loss leave him? He is too good, too magnetic, too dangerous to be a speed bump on Ospreay’s Wembley push. The Owen has given Swerve needed direction, and losing it shouldn’t cause him to drift. A loss is fine; a loss with no direction is not. This is a bankable performer who headlined All In 2024 alongside the greatest wrestler of all time. He deserves something meaty and meaningful. I hope he’s positioned that way coming out of this match.
Prediction: Ospreay
Mercedes Mone vs. Maya World in the women’s Owen Hart Foundation tournament finals
Mercedes’ return was the adrenaline shot the women’s division desperately needed. With Willow Nightingale and Toni Storm on the shelf, the division felt like it was getting lost in Thekla’s atmosphere. No more. The biggest star and the gravitational center of the division are back with eyes on something bigger than all the belts she used to have. None of them mattered because they weren’t the big one, and the big one is all her eyes can see.
Overcoming Athena was a triumph for World. Beating Mercedes would be an achievement of an even higher order. It would be a one-night star-making performance. Athena is a world class top tier talent, but Mercedes is the real final boss, the truest measuring stick one can have in North American women’s wrestling. The lights will never be brighter, the stakes never higher, and, forgive the pun, Maya has the chance to shock the world.
But she won’t. Her incredible story ends here, in California, a place full of dreams realized, but an even bigger graveyard for the ones that have died.
Prediction: Mone
Zack Sabre Jr. vs. Kenny Omega
It is genuinely difficult to believe these two, with their resumes and standing as two of the defining performers of the last decade, have shared a ring exactly once, that being at the 2018 G1 Climax. That this is only the second chapter of a rivalry that should have at least five is a reminder that no matter how much time you think you have, there is never time for everything.
They are two entirely different kinds of caricature. Omega is the maximalist anime-style protagonist. Everything slightly too much, every line reading a little corny, whether by design or accident, his excess either endearing or exhausting, depending on your preferences.
Sabre Jr. is the perfect British dickhead, all angular submission holds and sayings that land slightly sideways to silly American ears. It’s a shame he hasn’t had more mic time to call Kenny darling and criticize American largess. The contrast is nice, but truthfully, all we need here is for the bell to ring.
Omega’s intentions are clear. His sights are dead set on the AEW World Championship, and the one last run he is owed before time tells him he can’t. A convincing win over ZSJ keeps that road open, at least for a little while longer.
Prediction: Omega
AEW World Tag Team Champions Christian Cage & Adam Copeland defend against The Dogs (David Finlay & Clark Connors)
The Cage and Cope legacy tour continues with selected dates in selected series near you. Tickets sure to be available.
I do think we have perhaps overindexed on the historical significance of Cage and Cope (or Cope and Cage) as a tag team. They are more known for their individual accomplishments, rather than what they achieved as a team. The natural comps of their era — the Dudleys, the Hardys — are known for what they built together, not what they did apart. Even when Matt was Broken and Jeff was off doing whatever he felt like, the Hardys always felt cosmically drawn back to each other in the way that only blood demands. Two pals from Canada don’t have the same pull.
I have enjoyed the integration of The Dogs into regular AEW television. Together or apart, they add depth and something different to the mid-card. There is probably no main event ceiling here for either man, but Finlay wouldn’t look out of place in the International Championship scene. Teams like these — strong mid-card acts with very clear personalities — can keep a division afloat during lean times.
Right now, times are lean in the tag division. FTR’s absence, permanent or otherwise, has left a gap that teams like The Dogs can’t necessarily fill, but can make it feel smaller than it is. Still, they are simply not winning this one.
Prediction: Cage and Cope
AEW Continental Champion Jon Moxley defends against Bandido
The bully and the light. The warrior and the dreamer.
Moxley arrives at every match with the specific, practiced menace of a man who has decided that what happens next is going to hurt. Pain is growth. Struggle builds character. Suffering is the point. That is his code and his deeply held philosophy, marked on his body for the world to see.
Bandido shows up in the opposite. Everything he does carries a joy that is rare in professional wrestling. He delights in his own ability and that never tips into arrogance because it’s too earnest, and too purely himself to be performed. He is not showing off. He is simply being and what he happens to be is extraordinary. He is beautiful in his simplicity, and his energy lifts an entire room.
This can be many things and boring is not one of them. The idea of Bandido having a normal one does not exist (what does going through the motions even look like for him?) and Moxley on a PPV is as bankable as it gets.
Prediction: Moxley retains
IWGP Global Champion Shota Umino defends against PAC
We all have our favorites and PAC has been one of mine for a long time. When he first signed with WWE many years ago, I was frantically pulling up highlight reels for anyone willing to watch because that was what he was: a walking highlight and a man whose relationship with gravity was adversarial.
Since then, he has become something more interesting. He became a performer who has subordinated spectacle in service of a character, channeling everything that made him physically extraordinary, being so athletically superior, into something with menace underneath it. My favorite muscle hamster has fewer jaw-dropping highlights now, but has become a constant one.
Umino is a reminder that progress isn’t always linear. Point A to Point B is rarely a straight line. The New Japan fanbase can be an unforgiving audience for a young performer still assembling himself in public. Just ask a young Tetsuya Naito how that goes. But unexpected rejection can lead to transformation. Shota was stuck in the swamp for a while, but what’s emerging on the other side looks like a performer finding organic traction for the first time. Growth that arrives on its own schedule tends to stick. Promise takes time to deliver on. It’s starting to look that way for Shota.
Prediction: Umino retains
AEW Women’s World Champion Thekla defends against Starlight Kid
Professional wrestling has a complicated relationship with youth. It celebrates potential and then makes you wait years to fulfill it and in front of crowds that are rarely patient. Getting reps is an important part of that, yes, but the talent is what matters.
Starlight Kid is in her early 20s and, per Cagematch, already has over 800 matches on her resume. That is the blueprint for young talent. Not every young wrestler can work this schedule and that’s fine. What isn’t fine is telling talented people they aren’t ready because of outdated manners of thinking and creative bankruptcy, symptoms that continue to pop up in the monolith of this industry, not necessarily the companies represented here.
Thekla has been holding the women’s division together through an injury crisis that would have exposed a thinner champion. She held it together doing it her own way, in her style, and on her own terms. She stepped into the vacuum Toni Storm’s injury left and emerged on the other side as a bona fide top-of-the-division star. The doubters should be much quieter now.
She can’t look past Starlight Kid, but she can’t be blamed for glancing in the direction of Wembley with eyes on a big-time match with Mone.
Prediction: Thekla retains
Team Briscoe (Mark Briscoe, Roderick Strong, Kyle O’Reilly, Orange Cassidy, Konosuke Takeshita & Darby Allin) vs. Team MJF (MJF, Kyle Fletcher, Kevin Knight, Kazuchika Okada & Andrade El Idolo in a steel cage match.
If Briscoe’s team wins, he gets a World title shot against MJF.
There is an easy, television-friendly explanation for the shape of this match. Simple by design, meant to be a fun transitional program while whatever is coming for MJF at All In reveals itself. But that’s the future. All that matters now is that Briscoe is good and fun and silly, and MJF’s run to this point has been great. They are direct opposites in their alignment and there’s a straightforward shared history. Sometimes the best meals are the simple ones.
The more complex and robust element here is the Don Callis Family whose bloat has long since become a feature rather than a bug. They are in on the joke with a collective commitment to the bit that, despite it all, kind of works. Okada, Fletcher, Knight, and Andrade all operate inside a faction whose defining characteristic is that it keeps adding members and somehow just keeps rolling. All four of them are openly campaigning for AEW’s top prize, yet the machine keeps humming. The DCF’s presence in a match this size is less a storyline development than a reminder that no matter where you go, there they are.
A simple build deserves a simple conclusion. Briscoe is a fine challenger, someone good enough to keep MJF honest on television while whoever is waiting in July reveals themselves. This is the type of match a babyface wins, especially when there’s no title on the line.
Prediction: Team Briscoe
Follow along with our coverage of Forbidden Door and all of the action from Sunday on our website.
Mike DellaCamera has covered AEW since it began. He's just as surprised as you are.