WWE Vs. AEW Forbidden Door

About a week ago, to celebrate what was then the upcoming Forbidden Door 2025 event, Wrestling Inc. published a potential WWE vs AEW dream card featuring matches selected by our staff. We thought it was a fun exercise, and our readers seemed to agree, as you threw out tons of your own ideas in the comments. So many legitimately good ideas, in fact, that we decided to do the WWE vs. AEW dream card again — but this time, with your matches instead of ours.

Obviously we couldn’t include all of them, especially because we wanted to stick to the idea of only using a given wrestler once. We surveyed all the comments and came up with five that seemed to have broad support (and one more that didn’t, but that we just really liked). The results lie before you: This is What Could Be — if WINC’s readers had their say!

We promise, every match from here on out was chosen because it appeared in multiple comments, but when we saw this one we just couldn’t resist including it. Both men seem to have some inherent quality that symbolizes greatness in the modern world, particularly within the world of sports, which wrestling is eternally trying to emulate. Both Swerve and Reigns fit more naturally into that sports-adjacent universe than most other wrestlers, largely due to their public-facing presentation, and a clash between them would be intriguing based on charisma and personality alone, especially if they got any promo time.

As far as the actual match is concerned (assuming Roman decides to put on his worker boots that night) we think it would be a very interesting style contrast with the potential for a juiced-up version of the chemistry Reigns has with Cody Rhodes. But it’s also just one of those matches that’s as much about the mere sight of two former world champions facing off at the top of their game.

There was a time not too long ago that this would have been a battle of the WWE and AEW women’s division’s respective top dogs, but it’s a little bit of a different discussion in 2025. Since returning to win the 2025 women’s Royal Rumble but failing to dethrone Tiffany Stratton at WrestleMania, Charlotte Flair has taken a slight step out of the spotlight, ceding singles title territory to the younger generation and setting up in the women’s tag division instead. Meanwhile, Britt Baker hasn’t been seen in any capacity for nine months now, with her last match dating back to November 2024. She’s wrestled a total of five AEW matches in the last two years.

Are we crazy for thinking this actually makes the idea of a match between the two more compelling, not less? With a well-told story, Flair vs. Baker could be a battle of two women who have both tasted the top of the mountain fighting to restore their former glory, with each believing their only path to redemption lies in defeating the other. It might not be the marquee matchup it once was, but it has the potential to be a much more compelling story.

It’s not quite a first-time dream match, but their last singles contest on the joshi scene was in 2009 and went to a time limit draw; their last match together of any kind happened in 2011. Since then, Hikaru Shida and Io Shirai — now known as WWE’s IYO SKY — have traveled very different paths, with Shida becoming the one-time ace of the AEW women’s division (surpassed in recent years only by “Timeless” Toni Storm) while SKY is currently part of a dominant group of women on “WWE Raw.” Both are now multi-time world champions, and a match between them today would be as much a battle between the industry’s very best as it would be a renewal of hostilities after more than a decade of neutrality.

While there are other matches on this hypothetical card that feature bigger names and more personal rivalries, from a level of technical execution, this would be our pick to win Match of the Night awards. SKY and Shida wrestle similar styles while remaining fundamentally adaptable, and they are both uncannily smooth and precise with both their grappling and their strikes. If there’s any match that could bring the true feeling of joshi to the widest possible wrestling audience, it’s this one.

This match very nearly made the original list created by WINC, so it’s no surprise to see it pop up here. No matter your preferred style of wrestling — puro, lucha, deathmatch, whatever — is there anyone who wouldn’t tune in to see CM Punk get in the ring with Jack Perry, the man whose “real glass” comment and subsequent physical altercation with Punk led to Punk’s ouster from AEW at All In 2023? Would it be a real fight, or would they work together, or would they lie and promise to work together and then get in a real fight? Even at the current moment, when the Raja Jackson incident has the wrestling world spooked, fans across the world would still line up around the block for Perry vs. Punk.

The combination itself speaks to one the central appeals of wrestling: the blurring of the lines between fiction and reality. But assuming Punk and Perry were in fact able to work together to draw a house, the match would likely be tremendous. Regardless of what anyone thinks of either man as a worker in 2025, we’ve seen enough from their careers (particularly Punk’s) to know that they could successfully channel the heat into something raw and brutal in the ring — especially if it involved hardcore stipulations. After all, if a Punk/Perry match doesn’t include real glass at any point, what are we even doing here?

This one came up a number of times in the comments, and … yeah, we get it. There’s nothing complicated about it, and there doesn’t have to be — as Big E might put it, we’re here for big meaty women slapping meat, and that’s what Megan Bayne vs. Rhea Ripley would deliver.

The match itself seems self-explanatory, but an underrated element of this pairing is the respective auras Bayne and Ripley bring to the table. There’s a strange dichotomy to their presentations; Bayne is a monster heel but comes out looking like a literal Amazon if not a full-on Greek goddess, all fire and gold and winged helmets. Ripley, on the other hand is one of the most popular babyface wrestlers in the world, and yet her goth aesthetic is replete with chains, fishnets, and piercings; the wings that appear to spring from her shoulders during her entrance could be those of Lucifer himself. That makes this match almost a literal clash of the titans, which part of us hopes ends in a no contest when Bayne and Ripley are still fighting after the ring has collapsed.

While looking through your comments, we found lots of different ideas for MJF, often involving rematches with old AEW rivals CM Punk or Cody Rhodes. The single most popular idea, however, was a match that has never happened before and likely never will: MJF vs. John Cena. 

If the gods of wrestling gave us The Ultimate Pen, there’s absolutely no way we wouldn’t have had John Cena’s 17th and final WWE title reign end with MJF cashing in the guaranteed world title opportunity he won at AEW All In. Does it make sense? Who cares? Can you imagine the sight of MJF holding the WWE title over his head as he prepares to unexpectedly help usher Cena into retirement?

Anyway, even if you don’t want to make this about championships and contracts, this is still a match — and more importantly, a feud — that could have so much juice as part of Cena’s final run. The promos would be incredible. The crowds would be electric. The business would most assuredly boom. And if Cena’s showing against Rhodes at SummerSlam is any indication, he is still more than capable of the occasional Big Time Main Event Match, and MJF likewise tends to excel under that format. It might not be for everyone, but it would damn sure be a spectacle — and at the end, we’d finally get to know for sure if Cena is willing to put over the next generation on his way out the door.