Tony Khan Reveals Approach To AEW Creative Process
2025 was a good year for AEW and Tony Khan.
All Elite Wrestling won 10 Best of 2025 Awards from Sports Illustrated, all thanks to Tony Khan’s new approach to creative.
What Changes Did Tony Khan Make In His Creative Process In 2025
In a recent interview with Jon Alba of Sports Illustrated, Tony Khan revealed what changes he made to his creative process that helped him turn 2025 into a successful year for his company.
Khan said that he returned to his earlier approach of personally planning AEW shows instead of holding big meetings. He realized that too much collaboration slowed things down.
Now, he creates show outlines himself but still takes wrestler input, believing direct collaboration with talent works best for AEW’s success.
Tony Khan said:
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.
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. 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 added:
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. 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.
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.
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