Felix Upton on April 26, 2020
Pro wrestling continued through the pandemic, but it hasn’t been easy. Zero live fans are allowed in the crowd, and it’s unclear how long that will be the new normal.
While speaking to Uproxx, Jon Moxley discussed the challenges when filming in front of zero live fans. There are a few different tactics that people are using. Moxley mentioned the cinematic style that has been implemented a few times. In the end, it is a new challenge and it sucks the energy out of the building to have no live fans to play off.
Oh, definitely. Having an audience is such a critical element of pro wrestling and if nobody’s in the building it just sucks so much of the energy out of everything and it’s really challenging. Everybody’s kind of finding different ways to work around that, whether that’s the way you shoot it on camera, or lot of people are doing different cinematic style matches and stuff. It’s definitely tough.
When a building is going crazy and it’s all loud it can almost be like a mask and stuff. It keeps the energy going more, and so [without fans] you’ve got to dial up the physicality, you’ve got to keep everything tighter. I was really proud of the match I had with Jake Hager the other week in front of no people because it was just like kind of a real physical, realistic and we beat the actual crap out of each other. It was kind of what we had to do.
It’s not ideal for anybody to wrestle in front of empty arenas, but as long as everybody’s safe and so forth… You know, the whole world right now is going through real hard times and struggling and there’s a lot going on out there, so the best we can do in pro wrestling is just provide a slight distraction for a minute.
Jon Moxley is still AEW World Champion, but odds are his next title defense will be in front of zero live fans. Hopefully, fans will be permitted to return soon. Things might be a bit different for a while, but this is also a time when pro wrestling might surprise fans with the innovations that they will be forced to develop.
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April 26, 2020 6:37 pm
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