Tony Khan was thrilled last week when AEW mopped the floor with the competition and won Promotion of the Year in SI’s 2025 Pro Wrestling Awards.
In a new interview, Khan told The Takedown on SI that he fixed a mistake with AEW’s creative process towards the end of 2024 that paved the way for AEW’s success in 2025. That mistake was being “too collaborative” when creating the outline for AEW shows each week.
“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.”
Khan made a similar change at the end of 2020 that he believes helped propel AEW to new heights in 2021. The bottom line is that he no longer wants to hear what 10 different people are suggesting as the show outlines are being written.
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.
That being said, Khan wants to make sure people don’t think “collaboration” is a dirty word to him.
“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.”
Do you think Khan’s adjustment to AEW’s creative process made a significant difference to the quality of Dynamite and Collision in 2025? Let me know in the comments below, Cagesiders.
