AEW has quietly shifted its creative workflow as the company moves through 2025, with Tony Khan taking a more hands on role in shaping weekly television. Speaking with SI.com, the AEW President explained that while collaboration remains a core part of the promotion’s identity, he felt the process had become too crowded and was no longer as effective as it needed to be.

All Elite Wrestling has often been praised for its open creative environment, but Khan admitted that reflecting on past approaches led him to streamline how stories are developed and how shows are put together from week to week. The change was implemented toward the end of 2024 and carried directly into the current year, with a renewed emphasis on clarity and direction.

Tony Khan explained that the shift came from recognising a familiar mistake he had made before, noting that while collaboration is valuable, too many voices can sometimes blur the overall vision.

“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.'”

Khan was careful to stress that he does not view collaboration as a negative, instead pointing to how AEW was built on that very principle. However, he believes the most effective version of that collaboration happens directly between him and the wrestlers, rather than through layers of internal discussion.

“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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