AEW All In 2023 takes place this Sunday at Wembley Stadium in London, and AEW President Tony Khan shared his thoughts on the upcoming pay-per-view event, the current wrestling landscape, potential competitors, and more.
Khan spoke with The Hollywood Reporter for a new interview promoting All In 2023, and you can check out some highlights from the interview below:
On the ticket sales for the show: “We have got approximately 80,000 tickets distributed. We have had roughly $10 million in ticket sales and we have set every AEW business metric record for our own sales. We’ve hit our own box office record many times over, and certainly our own attendance record many times over. AEW All In at Wembley Stadium is surely going to be the biggest wrestling event in the history of Europe for ticket sales and box office receipts. So, obviously, we’ve proven that it was not crazy. And it stands as one of the all-time biggest wrestling shows of all time [worldwide] in terms of tickets sold and gate receipts, so it’s very exciting. I believe we can live up to these very high expectations that are there for us as this is the biggest show we’ve ever done and we have a great track record of presenting excellent pay-per-view shows that are very well received both by the fans and by wrestling writers.”
On the show airing early on Sunday: “It’s an interesting experiment putting a wrestling show in the NFL window, in that 1 p.m. Eastern, 10 a.m. Pacific window. It’s the same window that the NFL games start every Sunday, but we’ve got a little bit of a jump on them here. It’s a couple of weeks before the NFL kicks off.”
On where the wrestling business stands today in terms of ebbs and flows: “This is why I wanted to get into the pro wrestling business. I believe that, as we stand here today, this is the strongest the pro wrestling industry has been in many years. We stand in a really strong position as wrestling fans right now. Clearly, the voice of wrestling fans is being heard all over the world. This is the most weekly wrestling content that’s been available on television every week in over 20 years. There used to be so much wrestling on TV every week. I grew up when there was wrestling almost every day across different promotions, and there were multiple hot promotions that would have sellout crowds and run events all over the country.
“That went away, and there was only one company really running international pro wrestling and putting on multiple events per week on television. Then we launched AEW in 2019 officially, I started working on it in 2018. And after working on this for over five years, I am very happy that the wrestling business is in such a strong position right now. It’s great for the wrestlers, it’s great for the wrestling fans and for wrestling promoters, and the industry leaders, of which AEW is now one.”
On which companies he views as competition beyond WWE: “I do follow other pro wrestling companies very closely and scout pro wrestling. I’m a pro wrestling fan, so I love to follow what’s happening. Of course, I know everything that happening in AEW, but I like to follow what’s happening in other wrestling promotions as well. I also love to follow sports. I work in NFL football and English Premier League [soccer] and follow everything very closely with the Jaguars and Fulham but also with our opponents. For the NFL, that means following the other 31 teams and their transactions, their injuries, and their form, and then also following college football and keeping an eye on the players for the future. In England, of course, I am following the English Premier League [EPL], but I also the other divisions, such as The Championship, very closely and a lot of international leagues: the Bundesliga [in Germany], the Ligue 1 in France, Serie A in Italy, La Liga in Spain and the goings on in the other major leagues.
“Fittingly enough, these great sports that I also work in can be competition for AEW at times but are so many great things happening in the world of sports, there are a lot of people competing for those eyeballs. I mentioned NFL and college football. I think Saturday’s a very crowded landscape where Collision runs, but it’s a very exciting time for us with Collision that we’ve been able to launch his show on Saturday night and bring pro wrestling back to Saturday nights in America. It was actually Mr. Zaslav’s [Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav] idea to get AEW two hours on Saturday night on TNT, and that has been a very successful launch. We have a great audience every Wednesday night for AEW Wednesday night Dynamite on TBS. And now also have these two shows on TNT Friday nights with Rampage and Saturday nights with Collision.
“There are different sports on it. The thing about sports is it’s seasonal for the most part, whereas wrestling is year-round. So in the summer, you might have different competition from what you have in the winter. This is an interesting time for us right now. We’ve had a very strong run of ratings: AEW Dynamite has been the number 1 show on cable on Wednesday for several weeks in a row. Later as we get into the winter, there’ll be a lot of different sports as competition, with the NBA starting back up, college basketball, and other sports. But I’m trying to go out of my way to avoid putting AEW on against the NFL whenever possible. So typically, you don’t have AEW on Sundays during NFL windows. For the most part, on Mondays and Thursdays, we typically don’t have AEW. The NFL, I believe, is the strongest sports property in the entire world.”
On how he and AEW’s team defines itself compared to the competition: “When I first started working with Warner Bros. Discovery, they handed me a big deck of what it is to be a challenger brand. Because this is their expertise, they said: ‘You’re going to be a challenger brand.’ They were totally right. Pepsi is a challenger brand. Pepsi is a huge player in the industry and a major corporation, but nobody would claim that Pepsi is a worldwide leader in the industry. They’re a challenger brand and they’re competing with an established company that’s been around a very long time and they’re taking them on. And they built a huge market share in this space as the challenger brand in that space.
“Burger King is another great example of a challenger brand. A lot of their marketing is directed at referring to themselves as that challenger brand and taking on an established leader, and they’re not afraid to call out that leader when they think there’s something that they can do better. There are a lot of examples of these kinds of challenger brands. I think what AEW has established for ourselves is that we’re a challenger brand in a multibillion-dollar business, and we have a large market share carved out for ourselves.
“What’s very interesting in the U.K., which is a major media market and one of the best markets for the pro wrestling industry, AEW is carving out a legitimate claim as the industry leader now. It’s very exciting because as a challenger brand, your goal is to go into the different major markets and territories and win them over and try to turn places. If we can go into some major places and take the lead, then that’s really a huge step for us. And right now in the U.K., AEW is the industry leader in pro wrestling: we’ve set the box office records, we have by far the biggest TV audience every week thanks to our partnership with ITV, which has a great history in the wrestling business. [In the U.K., WWE shows have aired on BT Sport, which recently became part of TNT Sports, a joint venture of BT and Warner Bros. Discovery.] The average person in the U.K. knows ITV is the home of pro wrestling going back many years to World of Sport. And now, AEW, thanks to the great viewership we get on ITV every week, is by far the most-watched wrestling promotion across our shows Dynamite, Rampage, and Collision. Now that we’re so close to All In at Wembley Stadium, which was, I think, the most ambitious move ever in European pro wrestling, it’s very, very exciting. And it feels like it’s one of the most important events in the history of pro wrestling this Sunday, Aug. 27.”
