In a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter prior to the AEW All In pay-per-view, All Elite Wrestling President Tony Khan discussed several topics, including how far ahead he plans storylines for the company.

“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 Bryan Danielson with a broken arm, and PAC has been out with internal injuries, 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, 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 4 days of each other, and the Winter of 2023 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.

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.”

The full interview is available at this link.