Posted in: AEW, Sports, TV | Tagged: aew, all out, tony khan, wrestling

Tony Khan Says AEW Live Crowd Shows are Kinda Like Drive-In Movies

With the All Out PPV coming this Saturday, AEW President Tony Khan held court over the wrestling media like the king he is. And Khan is a benevolent ruler, doling out gifts of click and bait for all of his subjects, providing the sustenance on which the 24-hour wrestling news cycle thrives: quotes that can be turned into articles.

And so, as Khan got to discussing AEW's live events, which have recently begun allowing fans to attend. Khan was very generous with his words, providing far more than needed to reach the minimum threshold of search-engine-optimized content, especially when he began waxing nostalgic about his love of drive-in movies.

"If you want to see a show with wrestling fans in a packed arena, I can't give that to you right now, but what I can't give you, and I've talked a lot about in the last week or two, has been a drive-in movie theater," Khan explained. "I know everybody wants to go back to the movies. At least I do. I used to go to the movies all the time since I was a kid. And, you know, it's one of my releases, and I haven't obviously been able to go to the cinema in a really long time. But the drive-in movie is a way to go with your friends and family and feel safe and do the same thing you used to do before, which is go see a new movie together. And, you know, in a kind of a captive experience where everyone's not going to be in their phones and paying attention to the movie on the big screen."

Trust us; this metaphor is going somewhere. Khan explained that the socially-distanced live crowds in AEW show are kinda sorta like the experience of a drive-in movie.

"And I can't offer you the cinema, but I can offer you the drive-in movie," Khan continued. "And that's how I feel about what we're doing with the live events. And it's one of the great highs for me. And to see the live crowd, Chris Jericho described it as one of the great highs of his 30-year storybook career, last week, having that crowd back. We've got a lot of unallocated space we didn't use, but we didn't want to stretch the security personnel. The people, the staff at Daily's Place, and the AEW team have done such an amazing job on this. And we're gonna go a little bit closer to 15 percent for All Out. And again, I compare it to the drive-in movie theater. I think this is ninety-nine, over ninety-nine percent safer than the experience of packing people into an arena. I think this is the only way to do live event wrestling shows right now is outdoor, socially distanced seating pods, fans in protective masks, and having people around. Not to be a jerk about it, but just to remind people, hey, please don't get out of your pod and go hang out with the people in the other pods and please keep your mask on when you're not sipping your drink or eating your pretzel or, you know."

At some point, Khan seemed to realize that this was a media call about the AEW All Out PPV and not a Steven Spielberg flick about the wonder of childhood. So he got back around to promoting the PPV.

"So we've we had that," Khan concluded. "And this weekend will be, I believe, one of the all-time highs in the company. When you look at the card, which, you know, I think now we can hopefully spend more time talking about it. And I'd rather than me giving you this long-winded answer, I just I'm really excited for it. I think Saturday, All Out, it's gonna be a lot different than All Out last year, but I wouldn't have it any other way for the situation we're in. The people I'm with. Please, if you ever liked an AEW show, check out All Out this weekend, because I think it will be some of our strongest work."

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