>>10734726The Pyongyang Sports Festival dates need a huge asterisk, because yeah, they had 355k people total in both nights, but over 98% of those people were MANDATED to be in the shows. It's a "revenue by pure forced volume" kind of thing
As for the Tokyo Dome shows, in first place there's Inoki's retirement, in second there's the incredible NJPW vs UWF angle (Which partially inspired the NWO), and then you have a lot of shows that are sold out by either Keiji Mutoh, Kensuke Sasaki or this fat motherfucker, who, believe it or not, was the top drawing guy of the era overall.
Wrestling took a gigantic hit in the early 2000s due to the rise of MMA's popularity and with it, the understanding of how actual real fights look like. It didn't help that Inoki had a bunch of his stars get BTFO by MMA legends when he was doing his (also big dime drawing for a while) MMA events.
Keiji Mutoh, a man responsible for a few of those shows in the graph, "only" got 30k people in his retirement show. Needless to say that if it happened in the 90s, it would definitely be somewhere in this list.
But New Japan has very little financial issues nowadays. They will likely never reach these peaks, but now that COVID is over and crowds are starting to come back, they're starting to look healthy and their prospects at getting healthier look great.
