Michael Oku Made It His Year Long Goal To Compete On AEW x NJPW Forbidden Door 2025

Michael Oku made it his goal to compete on AEW x NJPW Forbidden Door in 2025.

On the AEW x NJPW Forbidden Door Zero Hour earlier this year in London, Michael Oku would compete in a trios match, teaming with JetSpeed (Kevin Knight and Speedball Mike Bailey) to take on The Demand (Ricochet, Bishop Kaun and Toa Liona). This would not be Oku’s first AEW appearance, but did mark his first appearance on an AEW pay-per-view.

While speaking to the Five Marks in a new interview, Oku noted that it was a year long goal of his to compete on AEW x NJPW Forbidden Door.

“100%, I looked at it as a goal. 100% when they announced it, it was at OG2 Arena. It was kind of coming out that it was at O2 Arena around the time of last year’s All In. I said, yeah, okay. I’m not on this Wembley Stadium show. I’m going to aim to be at the O2 Arena for Forbidden Door. So everything that I did from August 2024 to August 2025 was working my way towards that goal and I tried to set vague goals in wrestling just because that way you don’t get disappointed. But that was the one I was like, ‘no, I can be on this show and I feel like I should be on this show.’ and I’m going to prove that it makes sense for me to be on the show. But even having said that, it was still a bit of, when I found out I’d be wrestling on it, it was still a bit of, okay, all right, here we go. Wow, it’s actually happening. Here we go. So it was that combination of the surprise as well as it being the goal.”

Elsewhere in the same interview, Oku spoke about how MJF personally wanted a match with him at RevPro Summer Sizzler 2024. You can read more about that here.

Should you use any portion of the quotes above, transcription credit should go to Fightful with an H/T linking back to this article.