The main event of AEW Revolution left a sour taste in people’s mouths, with some referring to the lack of pyro for the “Exploding Barbed Wire Deathmatch” as All Elite Wrestling’s first major dud. As it turns out, the finale didn’t go according to plan, and Tony Khan says that’s what happens when you hire a proper pyrotechnics team that doesn’t understand wrestling.
Tony Khan was a guest on the Dan Le Batard Show and went into detail about what went wrong during the match and why he ultimately got his money back after it was all said and done.
“I’ll never let the non-wrestling people—I was trying to be too safe and I let the ‘professionals’ handle the stuff and they’re guys that don’t understand wrestling. They are professional pyrotechnic guys and they totally—can I say it? They totally shit the bed. I ended up not paying them and so it was like $100,000 that they ended up refunding me for all of the expenses of the match,” Khan explained. “I didn’t ended up paying for the [Exploding] Barbed Wire Deathmatch, which I shouldn’t have, because these guys screwed up royally. We put together something great, Kenny [Omega] and Jon [Moxley] worked their asses off and all they had to do was set off the final explosion. And again, this is because we used professional pyrotechnic people that were supposed to know [what they were doing].”
Khan continued, noting that they will make another attempt at the Exploding Barbed Wire Deathmatch because it drew the first time. He then stressed the importance of moving on and following up with an incredible event in AEW Double Or Nothing that put them back on the right path.
“And the next time that we do this—and I will do it again because the match drew—everything that Jon and Kenny did up to that point was outstanding, it wasn’t their fault. So anyway, long story short, that was a long time ago and we bounced back since then, but what I’m really proud of basically since that, three months ago, everything has been perfect and couldn’t have really gone much better. What I was really grateful for was the next pay-per-view was up and did a big number up from last year’s Double Or Nothing. It was probably up there with probably the best shows we’ve ever done, and it was really important to me to come back and give the fans a pay-per-view that was start-to-finish great. Where you get in trouble in the wrestling business is not if you make one mistake,” Khan noted, “it’s if you make a consistent pattern of making these mistakes and make a habit of it, if you do a string of bad shows, that’s where you’re going to screw up.”
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