AEW President and CEO Tony Khan recently made an appearance on the Monaco Streaming Film Festival for an interview, where he discussed being pitched an idea to do a show for AEW with the same format like that of WWE Backstage, but he refused as he doesn’t agree with the format of WWE Backstage at all and he doesn’t think wrestling fans would want to see such a format.
This is what Tony Khan said:
“I didn’t agree with WWE Backstage at all. I didn’t think that was a good format, and I actually had been pitched to do a format like that for AEW and I refused. I don’t think wrestling fans want to see that format. I think when wrestling fans tune into a wrestling show, they want to watch the wrestlers wrestle. Backstage, to me, should be like a lower budget, streaming-type show. I don’t know if it had legs to carry as a TV show even though the people involved with it are awesome. And a lot of them work for me now, and they’re huge stars, but like, I want to see CM Punk wrestle. I want to watch Christian Cage wrestle, and that, to me, is the bread and butter.”
Tony Khan also talked about how a show with such a format will be better through a streaming service, which AEW doesn’t offer yet, but with All Elite Wrestling having a great library of content that gets better and better on a regular basis as more new content is being added, a streaming service is still something that the company is working on and aim to provide down the line.
This is what Tony Khan said:
“[Barstool Sports] asked me about it, and there’s great demand for it. I’m excited to talk more about it because we’re building, each week, a great library of content. It gets better and better, and we can provide more new content, so I’m excited to tell people about that. But it’s still something that we’re working on.”
“[Free Ad-Supported Streaming TV] is a different subject, okay? Now, there could be a lot of content that could be FAST content that is not the premium content. I’m never going to put the $50 pay-per-views or every episode of Dynamite on FAST. It’s just not going to make sense, but there may be some of our programming like Dark and things like that, which are our developmental shows. Or even some of these things we’re talking about like conversational shows– that’s great for FAST. Like, I would much rather have a couple people have a cup of coffee and talk about wrestling on FAST. It feels like a much more appropriate place for people to sit down and watch that than on network television.”
Tony Khan then talked about how AEW is being seen as a pro wrestling company just like the WCW was in the Monday Night Wars era, which is another big corporate entity that can sustain and compete against the WWE.
This is what Tony Khan said:
“We have the bug and it’s never going away, we are never going to stop watching wrestling. We move on, it moves out of your life, you stop thinking about it every day for a week, a month, maybe even a year. But, in all seriousness, we never give it up. We always check back in on it, we can’t help it. And the thing about AEW that TNT/TBS, the network people, I tried to explain to them and now they can feel and see it. When you’re starting a wrestling company, it’s all perception. And people have to perceive it as being a big company and a big thing, and now AEW is being seen in a light that no other pro wrestling company has been seen in since WCW. Okay, there’s actually another big, corporate entity, another company that can sustain. It’s a major thing.”
