Tony Khan believes that AEW’s storytelling has become more focused in 2025 following a significant change to his creative process. Speaking with The Takedown on SI, the AEW President admitted that in recent years, he had allowed too many voices to influence the direction of the shows.
Taking Back Control
Khan explained that he refined his approach at the end of 2024 by eliminating creative meetings between shows and taking sole responsibility for outlining episodes. He compared this shift to a similar decision he made in early 2020.
“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,” Khan said. “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.’”
Direct Collaboration With Talent
While Khan has tightened control over the initial outlining phase, he clarified that he still values collaboration. However, he believes the most effective creative discussions happen directly between himself and the talent, rather than through large committees.
“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,” he said.
Khan noted that there are still plenty of opportunities for others to contribute, particularly in terms of character work and executing the vision once the outline is set.
“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.”
Khan’s comments come as AEW prepares to close out the year with its Worlds End pay-per-view this Saturday, December 27, followed by the New Year’s Smash edition of Dynamite on December 31 in Omaha, Nebraska.
