Tony Khan Details Changes He Made To AEW's Creative Process In Early 2025

2025 has been a landmark year for AEW and has even been considered by many as the best year the company has had since it was formed in 2019, even surpassing 2021 which is still beloved by a large portion of the audience. A big reason for the success AEW has had this year is down to the man at the top, AEW President and CEO Tony Khan, who took his creative process back to the drawing board at the start of the year to try and rediscover what made him love booking wrestling shows in the first place. Khan was asked about the change to his creative process in a recent interview with Jon Alba of Sports Illustrated's "The Takedown," and he believes he almost listened to too many ideas at the back end of 2024.

"I don't want to describe being collaborative as a mistake, but there is such a thing as being too collaborative as a decision-maker. Since you asked about the focus and some of the stories and putting the TV shows together, yeah, I definitely felt like I had a good approach that I'd refined in 2020, and trying to be good, trying to listen and be collaborative. I think I had gotten too collaborative, and it was kind of the same mistake I made at the beginning, And it really helped in the end of 2024, going into 2025, I just said, 'Okay, I'm going to put the outline for everything together myself. I'm going to eliminate the meetings between shows, and I will put everything together myself between shows. And then I'll come in with the outline of what I want, rather than have a lot of collaborative meetings where everybody chimes in what they think we should be doing.'"

Khan cited the booking of the 2024 Continental Classic tournament as period of time where he realized that he actually enjoyed being the only cook in the kitchen, which is something he has stuck with heading into this year's tournament as well.

Just because Tony Khan likes being in charge doesn't mean that he has shut out everyone in AEW and forced everyone to live by his rules, in fact it's quite the opposite. Khan explained that he might not be having meetings in between shows regarding the creative direction of the company, but he still listens to the ideas of backstage producers, agents, and especially the talents. With that said, the overall structure of each show is all down to him.

"They're all good ideas in their own way. And I still like to hear ideas, but instead of doing it as I put the outline together, I would rather do it looking ahead to next week, and take some ideas as I put the next outline together. But putting the outline of the show together, I'm never going to let it be a collab... putting the outline of the show together, I have a good process for it, and I'm back to the process that I used in 2020 and 2021. I don't want to describe ever being collaborative is a bad thing, because the whole thing that makes AEW great is collaboration. But the collaboration should probably, at its best, be between me and the wrestlers, and working to find the best path, and not having a lot of people in the middle of that."

Khan rounded off by saying that there wrestling shows thrive on collaboration, particularly when it comes to character work, but only after the general outline of how everything will play out has been forward on to people. When it comes to the outline, Khan believes that not a lot of people are needed for that, and it's much easier to structure a period of the AEW calendar by himself rather than having a team of people around him.

Please credit the original source when using quotes from this article, and thanks to Sports Illustrated for the transcription.