Tony Khan says storytelling in AEW improved in 2025 because he stopped being “too collaborative”

AEW president and booker Tony Khan believes that AEW storytelling improved in 2025 because he cut down on the amount of collaboration he did behind the scenes with other voices this year. Khan has previously talked about having final creative control in AEW this year, but has now expanded on the topic with new details.

“Since you asked about the focus and some of the stories and putting the TV shows together, 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,” Khan said during an appearance on Dec. 25 with Jon Alba on The Takedown on SI. “I think I had gotten too collaborative and it was kind of the same mistake I made at the beginning.”

Khan said he believed he was allowing too many people contribute when it came to putting together the structure of each show when asked about the focus on stories in AEW this year. He said he is now putting together the shows himself and not getting any outside help in terms of outlining AEW’s TV and PPV events. “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,” said Khan.

Khan clarified that he doesn’t believe collaboration as a bad thing. He said he believes that collaboration works best when it is him working directly with the wrestlers and not any other outside voices.“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,” said Khan.

“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.”

Khan has talked previously about having too many people involved in the AEW creative during the first two months of Dynamite airing in 2019 and how he he eventually cut down on the number of voices that had a say in creative in 2020. Khan said more people had become involved in creative over the years and he realized after mostly putting together the Continental Classic last year by himself he realized how much he enjoyed creating the product on his own. That is when he decided to make the change to AEW creative in 2025.

“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,” said Khan.

“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.”

Tony Khan is the current booker and president of AEW. He has been the president and booker since AEW launched in October of 2019. AEW has since expanded to having two TV shows airing weekly with Dynamite on Wednesday nights on TBS and Collision on Saturday nights on TNT. AEW’s final PPV of 2025, World’s End, takes place on Dec. 27 featuring a main event of Samoa Joe defending the AEW World Championship against MJF, Swerve Strickland, and Adam Page. The show also features the semi-finals and finals of the Continental Classic.