Tony Khan AEW Forbidden Door call: WWE head-to-head, Yota Tsuji story, live gate update

AEW head Tony Khan spoke to the media for over an hour Thursday ahead of this Sunday’s Forbidden Door pay-per-view from London, England.

Khan was asked about his thoughts on WWE running head-to-head shows against them and their recent media rights deals. He didn’t go into specifics, but instead focused on the success this year of AEW from their TV and Max viewership to events like Forbidden Door. While he follows other promotions, he doesn’t want to focus on what they are doing and has been super-focused on AEW.

Khan was asked about comments made about PPV being dead and if he was interested in bringing his events to a singular platform. He instead put over AEW’s PPV success and his various partners. He said he is looking forward to HBO Max “joining the PPV party” but didn’t give an update on that date.

He talked about how the calendar was a bit different this year in relation to NJPW G1 tournament and that the schedule for Stardom was the reason Bozilla was just made available this week to enter the TBS title four-way. He alluded to that not being the case in the future, but that regardless of the schedule, he will continue to do whatever is best for the event.

He said Sunday’s show will be one of their top five gates in AEW history and finds it noteworthy that three of their top four will be events held in London (All In from Wembley 2x).

Here’s some other news and notes:

Khan told an interesting story about Yota Tsuji and how he was unavailable for this year’s Forbidden Door or any of the TV leading up. He said he wanted to use Tsuji at last year’s event to challenge then-AEW World Champion Swerve Strickland but was essentially talked out of it due him to not being as established as a real challenger. Will Ospreay made a pitch for himself to get the shot which Khan eventually agreed to.

Asked about the lineup for the lights out cage match, Khan said it was the “exact lineup” he dreamed of. He simply asked Hiroshi Tanahashi if he wanted to do it and he said yes.

Khan appeared a little off-guard when asked about the future of AEW video games after Fight Forever, saying he didn’t consider himself an expert but tried to take insight & advice from those who know and they learned a lot. He hopes to make the next game much better and learn from those experiences. He is unsure about what the future is for games, but that it’s important to his fans and he’s trying to learn from that. He does expect future forays into gaming.

For the full call with more questions & answers, listen here.