Tony Khan recapped the moment he decided to launch AEW during his appearance on Marking Out with MVP and Dwayne Swayze, pinpointing a single Beverly Hills party in April 2018 as the spark that became Wednesday Night Dynamite.
“On April 6, 2018, I was in Beverly Hills, California,” Khan said. “I was at a party in Beverly Hills, April 6 of 2018, and I saw two opportunities converge at the same time. There’s a very exciting brand of wrestling. We’re talking about Kenny Omega. There had just recently been Kenny Omega versus Chris Jericho, which had done huge business for New Japan Pro Wrestling. And I saw the subscriptions go way up for Wrestle Kingdom.”
Khan said he had been tracking the contract status of New Japan and Ring of Honor’s top stars heading into 2019 and saw a window opening.
“I saw a chance to bring at that time the members of the Bullet Club, Kenny Omega, the Young Bucks, Cody Rhodes and Hangman Page, and also Chris Jericho, and have all these great stars,” Khan said. “What I didn’t expect is that Jon Moxley would become available, but I saw an opportunity, knowing that a lot of the top stars contracts, just from being a wrestling fan who followed the news in 2018, I knew that at the start of 2019, a lot of the top stars contracts with Ring of Honor and New Japan were going to expire. So there would be an opportunity for somebody.”
The lightbulb moment came when Khan spotted then-TBS and TNT president Kevin Reilly at the same party.
“I hadn’t planned for it to be me, but I walked into this party and I saw somebody I knew, the president of TBS and TNT at the time, Kevin Reilly, and it all kind of, a light bulb went off as I saw Kevin, and I knew that pro wrestling TV rights were getting very big,” Khan said. “And that now, for the first time, the economics of wrestling in 2018 are looking different than ever before, where the TV show is what’s going to pay the wrestler salaries and pay the cost of a wrestling company. It had never been that way before, and the TV show is now going to be the economic driver.”
Khan said the absence of wrestling on TBS and TNT at that point was central to his pitch.
“There’s this vacancy. We grew up on wrestling on TBS and TNT, so many people, and there’s this opportunity. There’s no wrestling at that point on TBS or TNT, and to me, all came together to create this perfect opportunity for AEW to feature a brand of wrestling, a style of wrestling, and bring in top stars from Japan, who, many of them were North American wrestlers who had broken out and done such exciting things in Japan. And I knew there would be a great business opportunity here, and I got TBS and TNT very excited about it,” Khan said.
Khan then turned to where AEW sits now.
“Now we’ve become the longest running primetime pro wrestling show ever on TBS and TNT with Wednesday Night Dynamite,” Khan said. “At the beginning of this, I couldn’t even begin to dream that we would be sitting here. And now we’ve had Dynamite on, and we’ve done, I think, now over 40 episodes of Dynamite more than what Nitro did. We just had episode 330 of Dynamite. We’ve had over 130 episodes of Collision now.”
Dynamite officially passed WCW Monday Nitro’s 288-episode run on April 16, 2025, with the Spring BreakThru special at the MGM Music Hall at Fenway in Boston serving as the 289th installment.
Khan compared TBS and TNT’s rebuilt wrestling presence to other sports leagues returning to legacy networks.
“It’s a style of wrestling that I wanted to bring, and it’s a place that I wanted to bring it, which is TBS and TNT, and I knew that wrestling fans love watching wrestling on TBS and TNT, just like when the NFL came back to CBS, and when we brought football back to NBC, it worked perfectly. And now NBA on NBC. These networks and these sports fit together so well. I really believe that pro wrestling belongs on TBS and TNT, so it’s very fitting that we get to do it there,” Khan said.
Khan said the years since the 2018 conversation have closed the gap he once saw between American TV wrestling and the Japanese style.
“I think that we brought so many of the top wrestlers, and now I don’t think there’s any kind of gap between how hard people wrestle on American television versus anywhere else in the world. I think people are wrestling really hard on American TV, and AEW is a huge part of that,” Khan said.
Where To Listen
Marking Out with MVP and Dwayne Swayze is hosted by Montel Vontavious Porter and Dwayne Swayze. New episodes release every Monday with audio at midnight Central and the video show premiering at noon Central on the Marking Out YouTube channel.
You can click below to watch the full episode.
