CM Punk Ends Sami Zayn’s Title Reign as AEW Redemption Struggles to Sell

AEW Redemption is two weeks away, and the Bell Centre in Montreal still looks like a building nobody has finished selling. Only one match is officially confirmed for the show: Thekla defending the AEW Women’s World Championship against Willow Nightingale.

Everything else, including the main event, is still a guess. That is a strange spot for a promotion that just made its biggest title change of the year.

Kenny Omega beat MJF this week on Dynamite to become the new AEW World Champion. It closes out a story that has hung over the company since MJF turned Omega’s title opportunity into a win-or-never-challenge-again stipulation match.

The timing is suspicious. AEW made its biggest championship move of the year in the same week that ticket sales for its next Canadian pay-per-view were revealed to be soft. That is not a coincidence anyone should ignore.

AEW Redemption’s Ticket Problem Is Bigger Than One Match

AEW returns to the Bell Centre for the promotion’s first Montreal pay-per-view since a pair of television tapings there in late 2023. The building has not hosted a bigger AEW show since, and it shows in the on-sale map. The upper 200 and 300 levels are not even on sale yet. Only the lower bowl, a section that seats around 8,000 to 10,000, is active.

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Floor seats several rows back are going for as little as $144. Cheaper upper-level tickets are $53, with plenty of inventory left. A “Champion” package priced at $626 has sold out, which suggests the hardcore base is buying in even as the casual tier stays flat.

AEW is not helping itself. The promotion’s promotional push has leaned heavily on Jacques Rougeau doing local media, and Jacques and his brother Raymond will be honored at Redemption for their years as one-half of the Quebecers and the Rougeau Brothers. That is a nice moment for a specific, older fan base. It is not a reason for a casual wrestling fan to buy a ticket to a 2026 pay-per-view.

Two weeks out, AEW has one official match and a single honor segment locked in. Will Ospreay, MJF, Swerve Strickland, Edge, and Christian have all been teased for the card in one form or another, but none of it has been confirmed. If you want people to buy tickets, you have to tell them who they’re paying to see. AEW has run into this exact credibility problem before, and it keeps costing the company at the box office.

This is not an isolated Redemption issue either. AEW All In in London is reportedly discounting tickets by up to 50 percent for a show built around Will Ospreay and MJF, a pairing the London crowd already saw last year. Two AEW pay-per-views in the same stretch of summer are both fighting to fill seats, and that is not a coincidence of bad luck. It is a pattern.

Kenny Omega Finally Gets His AEW World Championship

The one piece of business AEW did get right this week was Kenny Omega beating MJF for the AEW World Championship on Dynamite. The stipulation hanging over that match, that a loss meant Omega could never challenge for the title again, made it feel like a legitimate turning point rather than another swerve.

Omega’s road to this title has been a long one. There was a stretch of his career where the entire industry wondered whether he would ever leave New Japan for a North American run at all, including a period when Impact Wrestling was floated as a real possibility for him. Watching him finally hold AEW’s top prize means something because of how long that question hung around.

The bigger question is what AEW does with him now. There is no obvious next challenger locked in. Will Ospreay makes sense on pure chemistry, even if two friends wrestling each other before a bigger showdown feels backward. Hangman Page returning to face Omega would carry actual story weight given their shared history. MJF and Swerve Strickland teaming against Omega and a partner is the safe, forgettable option, and it seems most likely to happen at AEW Redemption, given how little else has been locked down.

A Hangman Page return built around Omega would be the version of this story with actual stakes. The two of them carried the Elite through years of shared history, split apart, and never really got a proper conclusion to that arc once Page’s own title reign ended. Bringing him back specifically for a run at Omega’s title would give AEW a challenger who does not need a single promo to explain why the match matters.

AEW’s Real Problem Isn’t the Card. It’s Who Can Sell It.

AEW’s ticket trouble in Montreal points to a deeper structural issue. The promotion does not have enough wrestlers who can walk into a mainstream media hit and make a stranger want to buy a ticket.

MJF is the best pure talker on the roster, but he stays locked into his heel character even in legitimate interviews, which limits how far he can carry a crossover push. Will Ospreay is arguably the best in-ring performer in the world right now, and still isn’t a strong enough talker to be the face who sells a pay-per-view to a non-wrestling audience.

Swerve Strickland has the ability but not yet the media polish, the kind of experience gap that shows up when a wrestler says things about their own promotion in public that a more seasoned pro would keep in the room. Darby Allin has a great look and a great presence, but his in-character oddness works for the diehards and not necessarily for a breakfast-TV booking. Chris Jericho remains the most reliably media-trained name on the roster, which says a lot about how thin that specific skill set is throughout the rest of the locker room.

Compare that to WWE, where Cody Rhodes, Roman Reigns, and John Cena can all walk into a late-night interview and sell the company in ninety seconds without breaking a sweat. Edge and Christian are sitting right there on AEW’s roster and would be a natural fit for that kind of promotional push, given how instantly recognizable they still are to lifelong wrestling fans and casual fans alike. It is worth asking why AEW hasn’t leaned on them harder for Redemption.

CM Punk Ends Sami Zayn’s Title Reign in Chicago

Sami Zayn’s WWE Championship reign lasted a little over a week. CM Punk beat him for the title this week in Chicago, in Punk’s first appearance since WrestleMania season, and the pop for his return alone tells you why WWE built the finish around him.

Zayn’s run was never built to last. He won the title in a triple threat over Cody Rhodes and Gunther in Saudi Arabia, specifically so he could lose it and set up Cody chasing Punk into SummerSlam, without Cody ever having to actually lose the title in a one-on-one match first. It is the same trick WWE has used before to manufacture a title change without real risk to its top guy.

None of that makes Zayn’s run meaningless. He is now a former WWE Champion for the rest of his career, a line on the résumé that legends like Roddy Piper, Mr. Perfect, Rick Rude, and Razor Ramon never got to claim despite Hall of Fame careers. The complaint should not be that he lost the belt. It should be that WWE never let the crowd feel like the reign had a real chance to matter.

A short reign is not automatically a wasted one, either. Jinder Mahal and the Miz both held this title for longer stretches than Zayn just got, and neither run is remembered as particularly meaningful. Length alone was never what made a title reign worth having. What matters is whether the moment itself landed, and Zayn’s Saudi Arabia win, beating both Cody Rhodes and Gunther in the same night, absolutely landed in the room.

The fallout got messy fast. Gunther, still smarting over being passed over for a title shot, attacked SmackDown general manager Nick Aldis and choked him out on camera, more than once, before Cody Rhodes’ music hit to make the save. The segment ran long enough that the show cut to credits mid-run, an awkward finish that undercuts what should have been a clean go-home moment.

The whole mess gets settled, or at least previewed, at next week’s Saturday Night’s Main Event from Madison Square Garden. CM Punk and Cody Rhodes are teaming against Gunther and Sami Zayn in the show’s featured match, with Danhausen taking on JD McDonagh, and Paige and Brie Bella defending the women’s tag titles against Fallon Henley and Lainey Reed on the undercard.

Raw’s Undercard Had Its Own Big Week

The Vision’s Austin Theory and Bron Breakker won the tag titles back from the Street Profits on Raw, with new on-screen couple Maxxine Dupri playing a role in the finish. Dupri is now aligned with Theory full-time, having moved on from her run alongside Otis and Akira Tozawa in Alpha Academy, a pairing that had clearly run its course.

Baron Corbin also returned this week, attacking both Trick Williams and Carmelo Hayes after their match. WWE has not been clear on whether Williams or Hayes is meant to be the heel in that pairing, so making Corbin the aggressor at least settles that both men are meant to be sympathetic for now.

The Bloodline Finds a New Way to Complicate Itself

Jimmy Uso beat Royce Keys this week in a match that Jacob Fatu initially refused to work, since Fatu and Keys are supposedly friends outside the story. Solo Sikoa had other plans, running in to attack Jimmy and drag Keys into the middle of it.

Fatu ultimately turned on his own friend anyway, superkicking Keys before laying him out. He then put Solo through the wringer, wrapping a chair around his neck and warning him to answer Roman Reigns’ call to rejoin the family on Raw or face something worse.

The audience cheered every second of it, which is the same thing that has kept this entire Bloodline civil war afloat for years now. Fatu committed a genuinely mean-spirited heel act against a friend, and the crowd treated it as a hero moment because the Bloodline brand of cool carries that much weight. Whether Solo answers the call, sides with LA Knight instead, or sets up something with Roman directly is still unclear, and Solo’s shifting alliances have been the most unpredictable thread in this story for over a year now.

What This Means Heading Into Redemption and SummerSlam

WWE and AEW are heading toward their next marquee shows from very different directions. WWE just proved, again, that dropping CM Punk into a hot city with a live microphone still moves the needle more than almost anything else in the business. Brock Lesnar’s surprise return last year reshuffled an entire card overnight, and Punk’s Chicago pop did the same this week.

AEW, meanwhile, just handed its top title to arguably the right guy and still cannot get a Canadian building to sell out two weeks from the show. A title change alone does not move tickets. Matches on a poster do.

The next two weeks matter for both companies. AEW needs to announce a full Redemption card immediately or accept a half-empty Bell Centre on pay-per-view. WWE needs Saturday Night’s Main Event to clarify whether Gunther, Cody, or someone else entirely walks into SummerSlam with a real claim to Sami Zayn’s old title.