Mariah May finally steps into the spotlight after All About Eve take down of Toni Storm

When Mariah May signed with AEW last November, Tony Khan announced her addition to the roster on social media, with the relatively by-the-numbers statement ending with a simple phrase: AEW is All About Mariah.

Now at the time, this was a tad unusual, but few fans took it too seriously, as they were either excited to see the former Club Venus member land in AEW or they didn't really know much about her at all. And yet, for the few fans who were in the know, be they cinephiles or simply pop culture fanatics, this tweet laid out the next eight months of Toni Storm's storyline, as in true “Timeless” fashion, the resident of Warner Brothers Studios found herself a featured player in a storyline as the entertainment industry itself.

You see, All About Mariah is a clear reference to All About Eve, the classic 1950s Joseph L. Mankiewicz for 20th Century Fox, where a young Eve Harrington, played by Anne Baxter, cozies up with Bette Davis' aging Margo Channing only to shoot herself to superstardom. Harrington grows close to Channing, takes on some of her mannerisms, and becomes a fixture of her life only for, when she achieves some success of her own, the tables to turn, with the young starlet leaving the aging Broadway star in the dust as she ascends to the award-winning spotlight.

With an award in hand, in this case the Owen Hart Cup and the belt that comes with it, May decided to take her Harrington turn a more violent way Mankiewicz never could have dreamed up, beating the bricks off of Storm and Luther just before Dynamite went off the air, with the lasting image of the show being the number one contender for the AEW Women's Championship holding up her bloody mentor by the hair with a smile on her face.

Was the timing of this turn unexpected? Sure, it probably could have come closer to All In or even at the show in England next month, but with a pretty long runway to tell further stories, it's clear TK has something up his sleeve, as he's been planning this out for months.

Tony Khan spilled the beans on Mariah May last month

While the decision to go all-in on the All About Eve nature of Mariah May's relationship with “Timeless” Toni Strom has been fairly well telegraphed since the beginning, there was a chance that things could have developed away from that original idea, with a new trio seemingly rounded out by Mina Shirakawa at Forbidden Door.

Well, as it turns out, in an interview with TV Insider a few weeks before Forbidden Door, Khan was asked about the cinematic influences on AEW and let out the names All About Eve and Sunset Boulevard in the very first sentence.

“All About Eve and Sunset Boulevard changed the course of AEW. Those are two of my favorites. If you’ve seen them, you know what I’m talking about. With “Timeless” Toni Storm, I took a lot of influence from those when I wanted to make her a character and lead off with her. We have a great tie-in with Turner Classic Movies. One influence came at the start of the lockdown. There were a few days before we had to do our show during the lockdown, which I think was March 18, 2020. I had a lot of time to watch other shows and what others did during these situations,” Tony Khan told TV Insider.

“I watched the late-night shows where they were using Zoom. I watched Stephen Colbert do his show and was great and had great jokes but something felt weird without an audience. I watched Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show, he had a production team and crew and mic’d up and laughing at jokes. It sounded like a comedy club. It felt more natural than anything I’d seen on the talk shows. That inspired me during the lockdown era in AEW because I put the wrestlers around the ring so there would be an audience. People cheering and making noises like we’re used to. It changed the show compared to the arena show and resembled the territory shows I grew up on. There were less than a hundred people at Techwood studio for Saturday’s TBS wrestling. There was also Memphis TV and another studio show. I think we did the best shows when it came to the lockdown wrestling.”

Welp, you have to give it to Khan, he really has leaned into the Turner Classic Movies of it all, which is probably a benefit for Warner Brothers Discovery, as that is part of the company's television offerings. While, again, he probably could have kept things going for a little bit longer, in the end, this is the storyline AEW wanted to tell, and it looks like it will be paying off in a major way at Wembley Stadium next month.