Tony Khan Acknowledges Mistake That Led To AEW Creative Process Overhaul (Exclusive)

AEW's 2025 was seen as a bounce-back year by many wrestling fans, with July's All In: Texas pay-per-view seeing the company run its biggest North American event to date.

Tony Khan's promotion took home 10 honors in The Takedown on SI's annual year-end awards, including "Promotion of the Year." A consistent across the voting was "Hangman" Adam Page and his pursuit of the AEW World Championship, a path that culminated in Dallas by defeating Jon Moxley for the title. The storyline saw Page go from AEW's most conflicted villain to its defining face over a seven-month period, and involved several other major players on the roster.

Speaking with The Takedown on SI in a lengthy exclusive interview, Khan said he believes a key reason for AEW's creative successes in 2025 was a renewed energy around its distribution and storytelling.

Thank you to all the fans who watch AEW, and to the journalists’ panel that named #AEW the Top Promotion of 2025!

10 total wins in the @SInow Wrestling Awards, including 8 top AEW stars!

Congratulations to all the winners!

Watch #AEWDynamite on TBS & HBO Max pic.twitter.com/PhAmVaU1TN
— All Elite Wrestling (@AEW) December 24, 2025

"I think that 2025 has been focused. I think we had a great goal at the beginning of the year, after doing years of wrestling and continuing right now to do years of wrestling for a long time to come on TBS on Wednesdays and the weekends on TNT. "We added something new to Dynamite and Collision this year with HBO Max becoming the streaming partner, and the simulcast of these shows," Khan said.

"It created an energy around the company, and a goal for all of us to do something new and exciting that we had never done. And throughout this year, there's just been this sentiment, I think, in and around AEW, that this is a great year."

The 43-year-old acknowledged that many AEW fans saw 2025 as a "comeback" year for the promotion, and elaborated on how the renewed focus centered around taking a more direct, hands-on approach to how the company tells stories.

"I don't want to describe being collaborative as a mistake," Khan said. "But there is such a thing as being too collaborative as a decision-maker."

Changing the structure of AEW's storytelling process

While diving into how AEW told stories in 2025, Khan mentioned that he alone is now in charge of formulating the outline for each episode of television. That, he believes, has helped drive the direction of the product.

Tony Khan at an AEW taping. | All Elite Wrestling

"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 has alluded to changes this year on media calls, though the extent of it was not as clear. In his interview with The Takedown, he pointed to the Dec. 18, 2019, episode of AEW Dynamite in Corpus Christi, Texas, as a "transformative" moment for him as a booker. The end of that episode was heavily panned by fans and critics alike, with The Dark Order overwhelming The Young Bucks and SCU in a bizarre beatdown.

In the interview, he acknowledged that initially letting so many individuals have input on the storytelling process was one of his biggest mistakes he has made during AEW's existence, and that things needed to change, even just two months into the show's run.

After that episode, Khan had two weeks to re-imagine AEW creative, which resulted in him taking more responsibility and cutting down on the number of voices involved. He believes that was essential to AEW's business boom over the next couple of years, positioning it as the clear No. 2 promotion in the world.

Over time, more people once again began to become influential in the outline of the programs. Nearly five years to the day in December of 2024, Khan was at home in Chicago, reflecting on the direction AEW was going. The Continental Classic had been largely designed entirely by him, reminding him of how much he enjoyed having the ability to craft the product himself. That's when he decided to make another major change.

"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," Khan said.

"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."

Khan's direct approach to talent

Hangman Adam Page — Khan mentioned that he worked closely with "Hangman" Adam Page this year. | Lee South - All Elite Wrestling

Khan also noted that he used 2025 to be more personally involved with talent when it came to mapping out creative, which could be beneficial to crafting stories and understanding how the characters develop alongside one another. He even specifically mentioned working closely with the likes of Page and Will Ospreay earlier this year, ahead of their Match of the Year candidate in May.

"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.

He reiterated that despite the switch in workflow, that doesn't mean other voices aren't imperative to the creative process, and he values the variety of ways everyone can contribute to it. Still, he believes the change was ultimately the right call.

"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," he said. "But assembling the outline for the show, I've learned, doesn't necessarily need a lot of people involved."

If you use any quotes from this article, please H/T The Takedown on SI. The entire conversation with Khan will be released on The Takedown on SI's YouTube page in the coming days.

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