Since the day Ric Flair first made his mark on professional wrestling, putting Anum in the figure-four leglock as etched in Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, fans only had longtime journalist Dave Meltzer’s fluctuating star ratings to judge the art form. A scale that often bursts past its five-star limit, rewarding wrestlers he fancies for their in-ring flippy moves. But now, the wrestling world finally has its own Letterboxd, called Dropkickd, where fans across the international wrestling community can rate, share, create lists, and debate the best and worst matches within the squared circle on their smartphones. Aftermath spoke to the people behind the app to learn how it came to be.
Dropkickd was co-founded and solely developed by Chicago natives Keni and Julian, who only gave their first names. While Julian takes on a creative leadership role as Dropkickd’s chief content manager, Keni handles the technical side as its chief technical officer and software engineer. According to them, this marks the first time Julian has put his Concordia University graduate degrees in mass communications and business to practical use, while Keni holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer science.
The idea for Dropkickd originated from humble beginnings: Julian’s girlfriend got into wrestling last year and wanted to know if WWE’s Attitude Era was as good as everyone says.
“We're both early 2000s babies, so we never watched it. And week-to-week, as we watched every episode of Raw and all the pay-per-views, I found myself wanting to rate these events and talk about them,” Julian said. “I didn't find anything that had, like, a big emphasis on the social aspect of things, like a Letterboxd or a backlog. I searched for it, but I couldn't find it. That night, I came to Keni with the idea.”
Getting data match-ready and funded
According to Keni, Julian approached him with the concept of Dropkickd in February of last year. As Keni recalls, instead of working on the Dropkickd app, the then full-time students immediately began developing their website iteration, which they completed from March to October. A couple of months later, the duo started development of the app, which was launched on the iOS App Store on April 20th and the Google Play Store a week later.
As with any creative undertaking, Dropkickd came with its fair share of challenges to work out before launch. The biggest hurdle for Keni and Julian was sorting out the scope of their app. After all, there are as many, if not more, wrestling matches as there are films in the world from companies outside of the WWE.
“On Dropkickd, we need to figure out what happened. Who is on one team? Who’s on the other team? Who won the match? What the match type was. If there was a title on the line. And the problem is that, especially across promotions, there’s no real structure for what a match type even is,” Keni said.
Users can run through and rate an entire match card for an event, whether it is new or old; they can also click on a wrestler’s profile to read about their backstory, learn their former aliases, and see the number of matches they’ve participated in, their average match ranking, and their overall rank as determined by users. People can also follow and comment on other users’ profiles, contributing to the sense of community that platforms like Twitter and Bluesky have turned into, transforming a pissing contest of tribalism into a space where like-minded individuals can explore each other’s opinions without the need for a “Fed vs everyone else” mindset.
In addition to the extensive archival work ahead of them, Keni and Julain encountered a technical issue: not all matches were structured the same way. For instance, some matches aren’t 1v1; sometimes, they involve multi-man matches or handicap matches with tag teams or handicap structures.
“A big hurdle is definitely the structure of the data,” Keni said. “It's not as easy as if we were to do something like UFC, where it would always be one-on-one. Also, the reporting and storage of the data is few and far between online.”
From the start, Keni and Julian understood that building a wrestling archive for Dropkickd would be a massive technical challenge—but scaling it as their user base grew was an even bigger hurdle. What began with 4,000 events has now expanded to over 200,000 matches, alongside a growing community that has now reached 5,000. To manage this growth, they’ve continually scaled their database and backend, finding creative ways to integrate decades of wrestling history across multiple promotions.
“As a team of two with large demands, it only makes sense that up ‘til now we've had automated data collection. We basically picked our favorite wrestling database on the internet, which is Cagematch, made sure it was OK with all the rules on the website, and then we source all of our match and event data from them,” Keni said.
To make Dropkickd a rich media platform on par with Letterboxd, the pair linked wrestling events from Cagematch to movies from The Movie Database (TMDb), a community-run alternative to IMDb. This allowed them to incorporate poster art, backdrop media, and event descriptions, enhancing the app’s visual experience. Despite being a two-man tag team, they’ve managed to keep the platform running through automated data collection.
They also funded the app out of pocket from October to late April this year. Since then, they’ve released two annual in-app subscription tiers, called Pro and Patron. These tiers provide additional profile customization options, including a verification badge, custom backdrops, access to beta features, longer reviews, and unlimited username changes. Pro, being the least expensive option, is available for $14.99 per year, while Patron, at $39.99 per year, unlocks more features, such as being highlighted on the app’s special Patron showcase page.
App store debut, deciding promotions, and getting put over by WWE’s Drew McIntyre
Dropkickd received a lot of word-of-mouth promotion online. For instance, I got a direct message from my friend about the app back in April, containing the message “Snooze or no?” which led me to reply, “lol is this wrestler letterboxd?” and inspired this very blog. Julian recounts that the app launch faced the herculean task of overcoming negative perceptions of the initial Dropkickd website, which was criticized for only including North American wrestling promotions like WWE, AEW, TNA, Ring of Honor, and GCW. In essence, Dropkick had launched with the long-held stigma that WWE had fostered, where only North American promotions existed in the wrestling canon, and therefore, only they mattered.
“A big thing for us was trying to get rid of that stigma—that Dropkickd was out and that it’s done,” Keni said. “We know for sure that it’s gonna keep moving, increasing, and expanding. We’ve expanded a lot, so the biggest challenge is addressing those stigmas.”
The app now features more than triple the number of wrestling promotions, adding companies such as New Japan Pro Wrestling, Stardom, Pro Wrestling Noah, CMLL, ChocoPro, DPW, Rev Pro, AAA, DDT, Marigold, Dragon Gate, and All Japan Pro Wrestling.
One thing that helped put Dropkickd over with a broader audience was when WWE wrestler Drew McIntyre made a post on his official Twitter account highlighting the app’s occasionally out-of-pocket list feature to generate some online heat following his win at WrestleMania 41 against Damian Priest. In his post, the indignant Scottish wrestler, who made a history of cutting promos about how he’d been screwed out of his championship matches, made a Dropkickd profile under the name “BigD” to chronicle “All the times Drew McIntyre was screwed.” Julian, keeping up with Dropkick’s keywords across every website, said McIntyre’s tweet had him wake up early that Sunday morning, freaking out.
“Drew is one of my favorite wrestlers in WWE, and at the time of the tweet, I’m pretty sure he was the most talked about wrestler on the platform,” Julian said.
“I woke up to Julian’s texts about that,” Keni added. “It was screenshots of Drew McIntyre WWE with a verified symbol, and then screenshots of the Dropkickd app. It was one of those things that hits you right away, but also settles in over time. I drove to McDonald’s 30 minutes later, and during my drive, it was still hitting me.”
Dropkickd has resulted in some pretty funny lists that only wrestling fans could create. While some lists are genuinely helpful, such as a starter list for Stardom matches that folks should check out, the history of the Golden Lovers, and the late Sabu’s greatest hits, some of my personal favorites are the truly unhinged ones. Ones like “Fuck da hulk hogan,” “Days that made CM Punk want to kill himself,” “Nights when Jon Moxley kissed a man,” and one that warrants further exploration, “Matches I watched while my wife had sex in the other room.”
Julian and Keni also get a kick out of users’ lists.
“Dropkickd makes me laugh all the time. I didn't expect that at all. Sometimes I'll be working on it, making changes, and lists will come across that are titled ‘The Best of Logan Paul.’ I believe the first list of its kind was Kane’s best matches. It was an empty list and it had me dying because I thought it was a problem with the app because there were no posters showing. I was like ‘Oh god, I have to fix this problem.’ I click in, and it’s like, ‘Oh, this list is empty,” Keni said.
“It’s not a format we were expecting,” Julian said. “It's kind of become its own meme.”
Then. Now. Forever-Type Shit
Wrestling is arguably one of the most challenging professions to enter as a fan. Due to its ongoing soap opera format, many of its storylines span decades, making it difficult to know where to start, let alone find a sense of community online to share your perspective without getting flamed by random people for not knowing its expansive history. After all, there’s only so much a person can do watching retro rewinds from the folks at Deadlock podcast, OSW reviews, or tuning into SuperEyepatchWolf’s latest video essay about wrestling being better than the thing you like. Julian and Keni hope Dropkickd helps fans, both new and old, not only critique contemporary and retro wrestling but also find a sense of community with one another.
One of the ways they are committed to making Dropkickd a more seamless and engaging experience for fans worldwide is through some in-development features. Some of the upcoming features they’ve shared include quarter-star ratings for more precise match reviews, as well as list notes, which allow users to add play-by-play descriptions to curated lists such as “Shows Where Nothing Bad Happened At All” and “The History of the Bullet Club.” They’re also working to bring the website up to par with the mobile app, bringing the code of the latter to the former, ensuring a consistent experience across platforms.
As Dropkickd continues to attract an international audience, it is also in the process of addressing language barriers by developing a machine translation feature similar to Twitter’s, allowing users to comfortably post reviews in their native language without feeling pressured to write in English.
While the app has been solely updated by the two, adding new events with every upcoming wrestling event manually, when asked whether the pair sees a future where they expand and hire, they said they’re satisfied with keeping Dropkickd a two-man operation but would love to hire database maintainers down the line.
“When I came to Keni, my vision for Dropkickd was for it to be an absolute destination to go to after you watch an event,” Julian said. “Something that every wrestling fan, regardless of whether they only watch Japanese professional wrestling, lucha libre, or WWE, can visit, not only to rate and review matches, but also to interact with other fans.”
