Tony Khan Credits Creative Process Change for AEW’s Improved Storytelling in 2025
Tony Khan believes AEW’s storytelling became more focused in 2025 due to a change that was made to the creative process.
Speaking with The Takedown on SI, Khan admitted that he got “too collaborative” with AEW creative in recent years. He was allowing too many voices to contribute when coming up with the outline for the shows. That changed at the end of 2024, with Khan now putting the outlines together himself. Khan compared the change to when he took more control over creative going into 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.'”
Khan stressed that he still believes collaboration is a good thing and likes to hear ideas. He just thinks everything is more focused when only one person is putting together the outline. And when it comes to collaboration, Khan feels it’s best when he and the wrestlers work together directly. there shouldn’t be too many other people getting involved in that.
“I don’t want to describe ever being collaborative is a bad thing, as 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.
“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.”