AEW President and CEO Tony Khan discussed several topics with The Takedown on Sports Illustrated, including the creative improvements he implemented in 2025.
Khan said, “I think that 2025 has been focused. I think we had a great goal at the beginning of the year, after doing years of wrestling and continuing right now to do years of wrestling for a long time to come on TBS on Wednesdays and the weekends on TNT. We added something new to Dynamite and Collision this year with HBO Max becoming the streaming partner and the simulcast of these shows. It created an energy around the company, and a goal for all of us to do something new and exciting that we had never done. And throughout this year, there’s just been this sentiment, I think, in and around AEW, that this is a great year.”
On being “too collaborative” in the past:
“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 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 gonna put the outline for everything together myself. I’m gonna 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.’”
On preferring to outline AEW’s creative direction himself:
“I thought that helped us at the beginning, and I think it probably helped us this year, having that focus where I’m focused and not having four or five, six, seven, 10 people in a meeting contributing great ideas. 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.”
On his direct approach and collaboration with the AEW roster:
“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. There are tons of contributions to a wrestling show, within a show, that can be found in terms of character work, or once the outline is passed down, implementing that outline, but assembling the outline for the show, I’ve learned, doesn’t necessarily need a lot of people involved.”
