All Elite Wrestling (AEW), a privately held rival of sports entertainment powerhouse WWE, is putting on its first international pay-per-view event on Sunday, All In at London’s Wembley Stadium, the biggest wrestling in Europe based on ticket sales and ticket revenue.
CEO and head of creative Tony Khan founded AEW in 2019 and has expanded its weekly TV schedule to currently three shows on Warner Bros. Discovery networks in the U.S.
In Part 1 of an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Khan discussed the state of the pro wrestling business, dealing with backstage conflicts and positioning the company as a “challenger brand.”
In Part 2, below, Khan addresses the importance of star power, AEW’s financial outlook, his thoughts on a possible IPO, how he became a wrestling fan, and how his father’s view on AEW as a business has changed.
Even people who don’t follow wrestling have often heard of some of its biggest stars, such as Hulk Hogan, The Rock or Chris Jericho. How much do stars or other factors still drive the pro wrestling business and how key has it been for AEW to bring in established stars and make its own stars?
Pro wrestling is a very star-driven business, and wrestling fans love to see the big stars involved in big matches and big stories. There are a few different ways that stars come into a wrestling promotion. In many cases, stars here in AEW have built a massive reputation around the world as top wrestlers and arrived as household names, such as Chris Jericho and Jon Moxley. There are also people we’ve signed in more recent years, like Bryan Danielson, CM Punk, Samoa Joe, Claudio Castagnoli, and many other top names.
And then we had a number of wrestling stars who established themselves as great names with a big reputation overseas, say in Japan, but hadn’t grown that fan base here [in the U.S.] yet. One of the things I wanted to do when AEW launched was help bring Kenny Omega, The Young Bucks, Hangman Page, and many others into the domestic spotlight and in turn make them international wrestling stars.
Then there are people who had come from independent wrestling and had built their names there but didn’t have national or international star power recognition when we launched AEW. These are names like MJF, Orange Cassidy, Dr. Britt Baker DMD, Hikaru Shita, The Acclaimed, and many others who became big wrestling names in AEW and, after working in smaller promotions, now are known as top worldwide wrestling stars.
Having this great roster of wrestlers has meant we have had so many great matches and so many great stories for fans.
Wrestling’s got such a great fan base. It is a connected, passionate, massive worldwide fan base that really can make the rise of a star meteoric. It’s been amazing to see how far the AEW world champion MJF has come from when we started. When AEW launched in 2019, our first episode introduced MJF to millions of people around the world, and now he is one of the top names in pro wrestling.
You have had a lot of storylines, feuds, and other balls to juggle on AEW TV shows as of late given that you have All In coming up in London this Sunday, followed a week later by All Out in Chicago. Why did you decide to do two big back-to-back pay-per-views?
It’s a fascinating setup that we have coming for fans with All In and All Out. The opportunity to do AEW All In at Wembley Stadium presented itself. Wembley had the date available, it’s a bank holiday weekend, and it’s been the perfect storm of business success. It was the right date and the perfect location for AEW All In this Sunday at Wembley Stadium. That perfect date also happened to be one week before the perfect date to do a pay-per-view in Chicago. It’s a three-day weekend in England for All In, and then it’s a three-day weekend in America for All Out.
That’s by design. That is really valuable live-event real estate in Wembley Stadium and that Labor Day weekend at United Center that we have for All Out. Both shows, as live events, are wildly profitable to begin with. People have asked if I’m crazy for doing pay-per-views on back-to-back weekends. But when you look at the ticket sales for the two events, we’ve already created huge profit margins for both events purely on ticket sales. And the pay-per-view is going to be the cherry on top of both events because we sold so many tickets to both events. So I believe the live-event real estate for those weekends is so valuable. And because those are such big live events, people are going to want to see them on TV, because those are the shows that sold a lot of tickets.
The bank holiday weekend in England and the Labor Day weekend in Chicago, that’s really valuable pro wrestling real estate in terms of the box office that I had no intention of giving up. And when I booked the Wembley show, I knew that that meant I had to keep All Out in Chicago as well, because we have a great tradition there that I’m going to keep going forever.
The business case is really based on the live events. And I believe the pay-per-view sales will also be strong. But frankly, when you’re selling millions of dollars of tickets across two shows, then you’re in a great position to cover your business base. The live event can help drive pay-per-view because clearly there’s a lot of interest in both shows – we have had 80,000 tickets distributed in England and over 10,000 tickets distributed in Chicago the following weekend.
Have you set any target for when you want AEW to turn profitable or anything you can say on that topic?
I typically talk about how I reinvest a lot of money. I have reinvested a lot of the money we gross in this business. Last year, we grossed over $100 million. This year, we’ll gross far more than $100 million – we’ll see where it ends up. But last year was $100 million, this year is going to be a lot more with video game revenue [for AEW Fight Forever, released this summer], Wembley revenue and the addition and [weekly TNT show, launched in June on TNT,] Collision. So our grosses will be far higher this year, and I’ve reinvested much of the money we’ve grossed back into the business. I’m still working off the original investment into the business, but have not had to put in more. And then we are reinvesting money to grow it as an international business. We’ve launched the video game, expanded the TV calendar, expanded the pay-per-view calendar and the merchandising.
We have a valuation of, well people have approached me with billion-dollar offers. So the business has grown. I’m not turning over huge cash profits. But as we approach the new media rights renewal, that is really the key not only to weekly profitability and cash flow, but also another large multiplier on top of the business valuation.
Are you ever thinking about taking the company public?
I’m not interested in that at this time.
You have a reputation for developing long-term wrestling angles and planning storylines and booking ahead. How far ahead do you plan and how far can you even plan?
I have long-range ideas and plans for things we can do. I do everything in pencil. On the AEW All Access show on TBS, I gave a look at a matrix that I built with all the different ideas. There are rows and columns for the different stories and where they can intersect and the different dates and how everything progresses. But this changes so often.
We’ve had major changes this summer. We lost [former ROH and WWE star] Bryan Danielson with a broken arm, and [former WWE and Dragongate star] Pac has been out with internal injuries. And Jamie Hayter has been out injured. These are three great wrestlers. In the case of Pac and Jamie Hayter, they are great former champions and also British stars I really was hoping would be involved in the Wembley Stadium show. But we have such a deep roster. It’s like when a sports team has an injury and switches people around and brings people in. That’s what we do.
So you can long-range plan, but there’s no perfectly safe plan for pro wrestling where injuries happen all the time and the unexpected happens all the time. So I’ve already had to make a lot of changes this summer from my original plans. Last summer was the most challenging run of injuries we’ve ever had when Bryan Danielson, Adam Cole, and CM Punk were all injured within four days of each other. And the winter of 2021 was also a very challenging period when a lot of people were out when Chris Jericho had a blood clot and Kenny Omega had all these injuries and was out for nearly a year with those. So those are all times where there were major, major changes to plans. In particular, when there’s more than one person missing, it can necessitate huge changes.
So I have ideas for things, and then I’m just hoping things go well. And sometimes we’ll change everything because things went so incredibly well and we say: “We need to keep this going or extend this or change the way we were approaching this.” So there’s a variety of reasons why I want to do everything in pencil, but make a lot of changes largely by necessity. A business that is so physically demanding, where wrestlers get hurt so often by beating the hell out of each other in these matches, leads to a lot of injuries and that can change plans. But I do think I’ve developed a good reputation for being able to make changes and still put great shows together, even when there are injuries or unexpected occurrences that change the lineup. We got a great track record of delivering awesome events even under challenging circumstances.
If for some reason, you couldn’t book an upcoming show, who would you trust to put together that show?
He hasn’t been around as much lately, because he’s been recovering from an injury. But if I got hit by a bus, or if I was ever incapacitated for some reason, the person I told my father that he should turn to is Bryan Danielson.
You have mentioned in the past that your father wasn’t convinced that launching a wrestling company was a good business idea. What was his initial reaction and how does he see AEW now?
He’s become a huge fan of it. He was very skeptical of this investment in 2018. And actually, Christmas 2018, nearly five years ago, we were really fighting tooth and nail about this, because I was very committed to it. And he did not believe in it. He famously had a quote along the lines of: “Look, I’m not going to be here forever, eventually, you’re going to inherit half his money. And if you want to start blowing it now, that’s fine by me.”
He basically told me to choke on it, and I did the opposite. And he has been very pleased with how successful it’s been. I was still a guy in my 30s. I had done a lot of things in sports analytics and sports media, but this was a different kind of undertaking, and he thought I was crazy. But now he loves it. And he’s the biggest supporter of AEW, and our marketing and media rights, and he wants to do everything we can to grow the brand. He’s been to many of the shows. He was at the first-ever pay-per-view event we did, AEW Double or Nothing in Las Vegas 2019. He’s been to a lot of our great events: All Out in Chicago, the first-ever episode of Collision in Chicago, and the first Grand Slam at Arthur Ashe Stadium in New York. He is the biggest supporter of it now but definitely was very skeptical.
What are your first memories of wrestling as a kid? How did you become a fan?
I didn’t understand the concept of wrestling on TV until I saw Hulk Hogan on The A-Team. He was playing Hulk Hogan, the wrestler, in The A-Team. a fictionalized version of a fictionalized character, so a really fictionalized version. I believe in The A-Team the backstory of Hulk Hogan was that he was a Vietnam vet. I’m pretty sure Hogan and Mr. T’s Baracus had been in Vietnam together. I grew up loving that show as a kid. I loved the action stuff. My favorite shows were The A-Team and G.I. Joe.
In The A-Team, Hulk Hogan did two appearances as Hulk Hogan. So that’s how I saw wrestling for the first time. And then another wrestler, Sergeant Slaughter, was the host of the G.I. Joe cartoon show. He was the live-action host of the wrap-arounds and introduced the show and pitched out of the show every week to the next episode, but then he also was an animated character in the show.
So around that time, I found out that Hulk Hogan and Sergeant Slaughter also wrestled, and then I started watching wrestling. This was when I was seven years old. I just got so hooked on it. And about a year later, I had soaked up so much. I went from not knowing what it was to watching the WWF, WCW, all the TV and reading all the magazines, and I knew what the USWA [wrestling promotion] was and Global and all these promotions all in the first year. And each year, it was like I soaked up an exponential amount of information. When I was 12 years old in 1995, I got up on dial-up internet and looked up: is wrestling real or is wrestling fake – one or the other. What came back was an FAQ from a newsgroup called rec.sport.pro-wrestling. That FAQ answered not only a lot of questions I had, but also questions I never thought to ask.
That day in early 1995, when I was 12, was the first time I’d ever seen expressions like “heat” [wrestling lingo for: crowd reactions or real-life animosity or conflicts] or “angle” [lingo for: wrestling storylines]. It was talking about different “finishes” [wrestling lingo for the endings of wrestling matches], heels [lingo for: bad guys], and babyfaces [aka good guys], and all these words that I learned that one day. And then it answered a lot of other questions. Hey, the Steiner Brothers are actually brothers, whereas the Beverly Brothers are not.
So I became a fan through television. I had a TV in my room growing up. I am a child of television. We had a satellite dish that I don’t remember learning how to use. We had a huge satellite dish in our backyard, at least 20 feet in diameter, and I knew how to point it. I don’t remember learning it, I just have always known how to do it. And so I could go into the satellite to pretty much anything and find anything. I used to watch the news, and Jennings would smoke cigarettes during the commercial breaks because we had the raw feed of everything. I remember being four years old and knowing what the West Coast feed was, because I had every channel and then I had the West channel.
So I liked watching and just made my choices as a viewer. I happened to gravitate a lot toward sports and wrestling, action movies, action shows, and different stuff like that. My parents gave me a lot of freedom when I was a kid, and they pretty much turned me loose on a satellite dish and TV. I’ve also never really been an early person, and that probably is why from a very young age, I’ve stayed up late. I watched David Letterman since I was a little kid. Staying up to midnight is something I’ve been doing since I was very little nice.
Anything else you would like to mention or highlight before I let you focus on running your businesses again?
The media rights are going to be very important for us in the future. That’s why I’m so proud that we’ve been able to do well [in the ratings] and have good numbers. We have established ourselves so we’re going to get really strong worldwide media rights for a long time to come.
We have also talked so much about All In and how big an event it is. I’m really proud because I think the stories we’ve told in this pay-per-view window, with MJF and Adam Cole and Darby [Allin] and Swerve [Strickland] in particular, have been really strong, even with the changes I’ve had to make with injuries and people along the way. The MJF and Adam Cole story is so compelling, and there’s so much interest in what’s happening and what’s going to happen there.
But there are a lot of stories along the way where I’ve had to make changes due to injuries or circumstances out of our control. It is a really hard job. If you worked in a vacuum, there are so many things that we’re talking about before injuries or outside circumstances. People often wonder: “Why do you do this? Why would you have all these things on one show instead of spacing them out? Or: “Why do this or that this week instead of last week?” Often there’s a good reason why. It is a really challenging job especially because it’s physically demanding on the wrestlers. Injuries as much as any other aspects can lead to a lot of changes, so I just try to work with the flow.
Interview edited for length and clarity.
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