With Vince McMahon running the WWE product into the ground as the head of creative, AEW quickly started nipping at the sports entertainment giant's heels in 2021 and 2022. AEW Dynamite ratings soon weren't that far behind RAW and SmackDown, but then things changed.
Triple H took over from McMahon, and the cracks started showing in Tony Khan's AEW booking. Storylines became more outlandish, and shows got ever longer, as Khan got too self-indulgent. When interest waned, he even started involving himself in storylines (with disastrous results).
During a recent interview with The Takedown on SI, the AEW President explained that, after a more focused 2025, AEW has benefited from his not allowing too many voices to influence the creative on his shows.
"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.'"
We've never known who made up AEW's creative team at this time, but Khan clearly feels that the company is in a much better place now that he's the sole decision maker. However, he still values some collaboration, albeit directly with talent rather than a committee.
"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."
"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."
AEW has never quite managed to recapture the magic it had when it was in such close competition with RAW, SmackDown, and NXT (a show it often beat in the ratings during the "Wednesday Night Wars").
Much of that is down to Khan, with his habit of ghosting talent and leaving them sidelines for months at a time often hurting the momentum of storylines. It's also clear that some wrestlers have more creative control than others, and their ideas...well, they're not always the best.
Let us know your thoughts on Khan's comments in the usual place.