Tony Khan was a guest on the latest episode of the Wrestling Perspective Podcast where he shared his opinion on scripted promos and why AEW gives wrestlers more freedom than other wrestling companies. The AEW President detailed what he does control with the wrestlers and then revealed what the talent has the ability to handle themselves.
“It’s a great question,” Khan said. “I think we’ve found a really good balance. I have a lot of trust in them and they have a lot of trust in me. What it entails is, I put together formats, matches, and stories and where their ideas are going to go, stories are going to go, who’s going to wrestle who, and one really important element of this is how much time they are going to get. Also, I have to be very concerned about commercial breaks and where they go. In terms of who goes when, who gets to wrestle who, and when it happens, there’s a lot to that. But in terms of what you’re going to wear, what your presentation is going to be, what you’re going to say exactly [that’s on talent].
“Sure, you need to say I’m wrestling person x at this venue next week on this show this night on TNT or I’m wrestling person ABC at Full Gear on Saturday on pay per view. These are important things and as long as you get those things across and do it in a way that makes sense, I’m okay not handing somebody a paper script and telling them ‘You’re going to say this, this and this in this order and every word of it you can’t change a word of it.’ That doesn’t make any sense to me and it would come across very fake which is why I think the promos in AEW are very authentic and it feels very real.”
Another difference between AEW and its competition is that the company runs quarterly pay per views each year while WWE has monthly pay per views. Tony Khan explained the key difference in what AEW and WWE do, mentioning how WWE runs into the issue of having the same rematches over and over again on their show.
“The flip side of that is you also sometimes see when you’re watching not AEW but other shows, like it goes on forever,” Khan said. “It’s like 17 rematches with the same two people. So there’s no happy medium between what you’re saying.”
