CM Punk is popular. Now granted, some members of the AEW locker room aren't particularly fond of “The Best of in the World” for his brash attitude, willingness to call out other wrestlers when they aren't even in the building to defend themselves, and for… oh yeah, getting into a literal fight with three of the company's EVPSto the point where Kenny Omega and the Young Bucks left Chicago with bite marks and swollen faces, but as a general rule, fans are generally fond of Punk, as his social media interactions and spot on the PW Tees top-selling merch of 2022 list clearly proves.

But there-in lies the question that AEW needs to consider, especially since Punk still hasn't technically been released from or bought out of his contract with the company: does Punk need to be popular in the locker room to return to the company?

While there have been decades of stories of wrestlers who don't like each other out of the ring still drawing money inside of it – just ask Chris Jericho and Paul “Triple H” Levesque – will Punk and the Elite be part of that same lineage, as fans believed to be the case when Omega and the Bucks started parodying Punk's moves in their match against Death Triangle in Chicago? Fortunately, wrestling's grumpy uncle Jim Cornette weighed in on the situation and gave some insight into how the OG AEW locker room might feel about Punk's return.

Jim Cornette doesn't think CM Punk would be welcomed back by the AEW EVPs.

Though many members of the AEW locker room have sung Punk's praises since leaving the company in September, with Dax Harwood and Ricky Starks both complementing their interactions with the “Straight Edge Savior,” others, like Chris Jericho has explicitly called him a “cancer” and suggested strongly that he wouldn't be back any time soon. How can those two sides co-exist? Cornette doesn't think they can.

“The story from the trampoline gang side of things was that, oh, everything was harmonious in the locker room, and everybody was happy until he came around,” Cornette said. “But think about this; when they started the company, it was all of the EVP’s hand-picked friends and every freak of nature on the indies that somebody had ever laughed at for 15 minutes, and Chris Jericho and he was more than willing to throw his lot in with the cool kids, but he was the only real name, and everybody was happy because it was like a little tree house, a little group of friends that they had hand-picked. Couldn’t draw a god*mn dime! Couldn’t draw money with paper and a green Crayon. Couldn’t draw any money if you dipped them in glue and drug them through Fort Knox, I could go on, but they were happy.”

“And then the company actually started getting stars and recognized talent from other places and people that the fans knew who the f*ck they were and might be interested in seeing them, and they raided NXT and blah blah blah, of course, they botched most, if not all of those debuts and pushes but nevertheless, a new group came in that wasn’t hand-picked and vetted by the EVPS and they just happened, in a lot of cases, to have more talent than the group of ragtag indie misfits that had started the thing, at least they had all of their appendages, two arms, two legs, things of that nature.”

“And Punk was the one that moved the needle for them the most. And Punk was also the antithesis of the kind of wrestling they want to do, meaningless goofy flips and twists and turns with their tongue and their cheek the whole time winking at you that they’re not serious. And Punk was the exact opposite of that. And Punk’s also a guy who doesn’t sit on his feelings or just sit at home and eat muffins and bury his frustrations when nobody is paying attention to what he’s saying. And there, you had a chemical recipe for disaster. And now, just like even before he was gone, but now especially that he’s gone, they’ve got to slander him, and they’ve got to make sure everybody thinks they’re the baby faces or else wise, they come out looking like the god*mn self-righteous, self-absorbed, egotistical f*cking tw*ts that they are.”

Unfortunately for The Elite, Jericho, Colt Cabana, and other members of the AEW locker room, Punk is still technically a member of AEW, and he's already back in the gym getting his body right in the lead-up to his impending return to the ring – at least in theory – in April or May. Will that return come in AEW? Only time will tell, but if it happens, some performers will have to have a serious sitdown to talk things out with their words, not with chairs.