Inside All Elite Wrestling’s Master Plan to Revolutionize Wrestling – And Take on the WWE

On January 1, 2019, the rumors and rumblings that had been seizing wrestling fandom for months were confirmed. The Young Bucks and Cody Rhodes had teamed with investor Tony Khan to found All Elite Wrestling. The new organization was designed to be the first major professional wrestling league to take on the monster monopoly that is WWE, World Wrestling Entertainment, Inc. Hype for the new organization soon took the wrestling world by storm and “AEW!” became a preferred chant for WWE fans disgruntled by lackluster matches.

But in a landscape that’s been dominated for decades by the leviathan nature of WWE, can All Elite Wrestling make any sort of impact on the sport? Where does the team behind the venture — President and CEO Tony Khan and EVPs Matt and Nick Jackson (aka the Young Bucks), Cody Rhodes, and Kenny Omega — see the core audience? And will AEW be able to truly allot wrestlers the creative freedom and professional support they’ve been craving?

So far, AEW has been testing the waters with a number of pay-per-view events like Double or Nothing, Fyter Fest, and Fight for the Fallen. While Double or Nothing sold out all of its approximately 11,000 tickets in about 30 minutes, the company decided to stream the latter two for free on B/R Live. It was a risky choice, but one AEW President and CEO Tony Khan stands by.

“In terms of putting shows out there for free, we took a bath financially on that and I took a big hit, and I was willing to do it as a company because I believed in our brand of wrestling,” Khan told Decider during a sit-down interview following All Elite Wrestling’s very first presentation at TCA press tour. Cody Rhodes, Chief Brand Officer Brandi Rhodes, and a number of in-ring talent were on hand that day to treat journalists to their first look at AEW’s upcoming weekly TNT show. Khan explained that his “dream” was to get AEW to the level “where WCW was.” 

“There hasn’t been a legitimate other company [besides WWE] presenting weekly, high quality wrestling, and never before was HD available,” Khan said, explaining he had every confidence that once AEW’s weekly show premieres on TNT on October 2, “the revenue streams are going to be huge.”

Right now WWE produces two weekly live primetime shows, RAW and Smackdown, that combined amount to five hours of wrestling per week. That’s not counting other WWE weekly offerings such as NXT, 205 Live, off-screen house shows, or their near-monthly pay-per-view events. In contrast, AEW is only going to be crafting one two-hour-long show a week for TNT, and Khan said this is by design.

“We’re basing the company to be way more wrestler-friendly and in terms of the scheduling, because we’re not going to have a constant touring of five nights a week or anything like that, six nights a week never,” Khan said. “And really focusing on that and building the big events, big pay-per-views and streaming specials.”

In addition to allowing wrestlers time to physically rest up and mentally relax, The Young Bucks (aka Nick and Matt Jackson) argued that this far-less grueling schedule gives AEW a creative edge.

“Our characters won’t be over-saturated. That’s a problem for the current product for mainstream wrestling right now. You see wrestlers way too often, way too many times, and you become fatigued with that character and that superstar, and they lose that superstardom,” Nick Jackson said. 

“[There’s] just time for things to breathe,” Matt Jackson said. “Everything is so overexposed right now.”

“It’s not about forcing everybody into the show to do one dumb segment just to show them in the show. We’re not going to drag people in and make them travel,” Khan said.

Matt Jackson concurred. “I don’t think everybody has to be on the show every week, necessarily. Like if they’re not needed like Tony said, maybe they stay home that week. Or we just give them a little bit in the back. Sometimes it’s just too much. But if we give them a little bit of flavor every week or every other week I think it would be fine. I really do.”

“We already have a lot of wrestlers in our contracts, so we don’t need to have them weekly. So some wrestlers might not even be on them every single week of the year,” Nick Jackson said. “So a lot of people are going to have great schedules that are way better than any wrestling company in the world.”

During AEW’s panel that day, Brandi Rhodes touted the diversity of talent on the roster, noting that more than half of the panelists they’d assembled that day were women. Khan wouldn’t confirm that AEW’s female roster would be given equal air-time to their male counterparts — “It depends on the week” — but he did say he thought AEW had some of the best female wrestlers in the world. In particular, he touted New Japan Pro-Wrestling alum Kenny Omega’s talent in scouting new joshi talent for AEW.

“It’s a different style,” Omega said, of joshi, a type of women’s wrestling from Japan. “It’s more artistic. It’s more beautiful, but yet it’s still strong, and yet it’s still very diverse.”

“I really think the joshi that Kenny scouted out could our be our generation’s luchadores because the luchadores and the lucha style became very prevalent through wrestling on TNT weekly in the 90s,” Khan said. “And now, almost twenty-five years later, the joshi could come in and just blow people away. I mean they have on our shows and it’s happening.”

Already AEW has begun pushing joshi talent like Aja Kong and Hikaru Shida. The two star were featured a six-woman tag team match on Double or Nothing. While Shida is officially signed to the AEW roster, Omega teased that there were still some stars he hadn’t introduced yet. “I haven’t shown all my cards yet,” he said with a smile.

“Person-by-person we’re developing a roster that can do everything the guys can do, and in a lot of cases, they’re doing a lot of things that the guys can’t do, or aren’t doing,” Omega said. “That’s why, for me, even though I’m proud of my own career and I’m still looking to do big things in my own career, but I’m most proud of that division and I’m most prideful.”

Khan, Omega, and the Young Bucks told Decider that they’re also committed to making sure that all the wrestlers have the opportunity to perform their best, while also being as safe as possible. When asked if wrestlers would be told that specific moves would be reserved for stars, Khan said that the bigger concern was safety.

“I feel very strongly that I want to take care of the talent and I want to protect these guys and girls and everybody,” Khan said.

“That being said, we’re not going to tell the talent like, ‘Don’t do this cool dive just because we don’t want you to do it.’ We’re going to say, ‘Hey, do the coolest things you can do.’ You’re very limited in other places,” Nick Jackson said. “All of our wrestlers are going to do a ton of stuff and we’re not going to limit them for what they can do and their abilities to do.”

Omega even added that they’ve been also studying their pay-per-views to make sure the talent isn’t leaning too hard on the same moves again and again. “For the first three shows or whatever, we had a couple of oversights where guys were doing too much of one thing or another or whatever, but now after the show we’ll always sit down and watch the show back and we’ll see, ‘Ah, I got to catch that next time. And oh, I got to catch that this time,'” Omega said. “Even last time, the Fight for the Fallen, we were more on top of our game.”

Fight for the Fallen was the last pay-per-view event AEW produced and it was one of the two events fans can still stream for free on B/R Live. So far, Khan couldn’t confirm if the weekly TNT shows would be available to stream for free, nor could he comment on the possibility that TNT’s parent company WarnerMedia might fold AEW content into its upcoming streaming service HBO Max. However, everyone could confirm that they see the Young Bucks’ YouTube channel, Being the Elite, as a key pillar of the company.

“What Nick does putting Being the Elite together every week and what Matt does both on and off the camera it’s so huge,” Khan said. “With Being the Elite you’ll see some of the most innovative stuff, but it’s going to be very different then the weekly TV show. But that’s by design and I want to keep it that way so you’ll have outlets to see different things.” 

“I think the reason why Nick and I have had big successes is because we’re very self aware and we have that meta style. We’re in on the joke, right? If someone’s talking about us, we know they’re talking about it. We survey everything. We know everything. If people are talking, we’ve heard the talk. We’ve heard the chatter. And it’s better not to ignore the things. It’s better to at least address the elephant in the room and talk about it,” Matt Jackson said, adding he prefers to address fans via Being the Elite rather than Twitter. 

“I think that’s the best way to comment on something like that is to do it through art like that, though,” he said. “Whereas so many people just take to a tweet. You could just look at a tweet and you could turn it and twist it ten different ways, right?”

The next two big dates for AEW will be August 31 and October 2. At the end of the month, the organization will put on All Out, its last pay-per-view event before they begin airing nationally.  “I know we are committed to doing pay-per-views, but not doing too many, doing the right amount,” Khan said. “Again we’re trying to follow up Double or Nothing with a great show on August 31st and live up to our pay-per-views being worth the money.”

Then October 2, 2019 marks AEW’s big debut on TNT. Details about that inaugural show are still being hashed out, but it’s already been announced that the very first AEW Women’s Worlds Championship will be crowned then, confirming that AEW’s team are indeed betting big on their ladies. In fact, All Elite Wrestling is betting big all around and hoping that there’s space in the market for a weekly wrestling show that’s designed to be wrestler-friendly and wrestling fan-worthy.