Matt Hardy describes how the idea for The Firm Deletion came about.
On the May 5 episode of AEW Rampage, Matt Hardy teamed up with Jeff Hardy, Isiah Kassidy, and HOOK to face The Firm (Ethan Page, Lee Moriarty, Big Bill, and Stokely Hathaway). The cinematic “Firm Deletion” match was taped at The Hardy Compound, and Matt’s team emerged victorious.
Speaking on The Extreme Life of Matt Hardy, the AEW star was asked to describe when he felt like the storyline could lead to a Hardy Compound match. He then described the process of how the idea came together.
“Tony said, ‘Hey, do you guys think we can continue this story until Jeff comes back?’” Hardy said. “It was like, I don’t know when he’s gonna come back, it’s kind of hard to have something open-ended. I said, ‘I think we can try. I think we got some legs in what we’re doing now.’ He said, ‘I would kind of like to do that, then you guys could team up again or whatever.’
“I said, ‘Okay, well, let me think about it.’ Then I remember Sonjay [Dutt], who would work with us on most of the Elevation stuff, he was the guy overseeing it from a creative aspect there at the Hardy Compound when we shot it.’ He said, ‘What if we do a Deletion match, with a big blowoff?’ I was like, ‘Are you kidding? I would love to do that.’”
Hardy continued by noting that there had been talks about having a singles match with him and Page, but AEW CEO Tony Khan came up with the idea for making it a tag team bout.
“At one point, we were talking about having me versus Ethan, but then having Private Party involved, maybe having Jeff involved, whatever it may be,” Hardy said. “I do have to give Tony Khan credit. He said, ‘What if we did a big tag match with Jeff?’
“It was his idea initially to do that. So we played around with that a little bit, and then once we got that set up, then he signed off on it, and we were off the races. That thought probably came in at the beginning of the year, probably like January or so.”
The full episode is available here:
The Hardys issued a final challenge to Page on the May 13 episode of AEW Rampage. Catch up on our coverage of the show here.
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