All Elite Wrestling is returning to the tri-state area for one of its major pay-per-view events.
The brand will return to the Prudential Center for the second consecutive year to host Full Gear on Saturday, Nov. 22, with tickets going on sale on Aug. 25.
AEW continues to bring major shows annually to the New York-New Jersey area, also hosting Forbidden Door at UBS Arena last year.
“Being around wrestling and being a fan of wrestling my whole life, I know it’s very important to keep a great relationship with the fans around New York and New Jersey, and we have such great fans in the area,” AEW CEO Tony Khan told The Post. “Full Gear is one of the best events every year for AEW and the wrestling fans and I’m very excited to bring Full Gear back to the Prudential Center.”
The company is currently riding a wave of momentum after a highly successful All In pay-per-view in front of 25,000 fans at Globe Life Field in Arlington, Texas earlier this month — its most attended show ever in North America.
The show saw “Hangman” Adam Page end Jon Moxley’s 273-day reign as AEW World champion to a huge pop from the crowd. Page, whom the Young Bucks called the company’s “main character” before All In, once again rose to the occasion when AEW needed him. Page, an AEW original who has already had meaningful stories with The Dark Order, Kenny Omega and Swerve Strickland, made it undeniable that he should beat Moxley and complete his redemption arc.
“What’s amazing is to see someone who was essentially the No. 1 pick that the franchise is built around and watch him grow and develop into being exactly the wrestler you hoped and dreamed he would become and even more,” Khan said. “Hangman, the AEW world champion, continues to get better and better. It’s very exciting.”
The show was the longest televised wrestling event ever at more than seven hours, including the preshow that served as counter-programming to WWE’s counter-programming attempt of NXT’s Great American Bash and “Saturday Night’s Main Event” on the same day. Khan thought the whole situation made sense to have the “ultimate festival of pro wrestling.”
“There are so many great stories this year that have developed into exciting rivalries. There were so many big battles, and the epic nature of the staging and the platform of Globe Life Field made it possible to put on this epic event with huge entrances and epic matches,” Khan said. “The only thing I have seen worldwide that had a comparable pace was some of the very best of the Wrestle Kingdom events [from New Japan] because typically AEW pay-per-view events have been paced differently.”
All In will move back to London’s Wembley Stadium next year. Khan said he has yet to think past that on whether the event will stay there or move to different cities in the U.S., after the success in Texas.
This year’s show was the crescendo of the full reboot of the company’s creative that Moxley exclusively talked to The Post about in November. Khan called it a New Year’s resolution to also reboot his approach to the creative process. He felt it allowed AEW to have more cohesive shows and led to a lift in the ratings from 2024.
Khan went back to how he wrote shows during the pandemic in 2020, when AEW was shooting weekly from Daily’s Place in Jacksonville, by putting all of the responsibility onto himself and only putting ideas on television he 100 percent believes in.
That started with him writing his outline for “everybody’s segments, not just certain segments but the entire show,” and then he would come in and “hear people out.”
“I think I found myself in 2024 doing some of the same things I was doing in 2019, in terms of lots of meetings and lots of good conversations, but probably being almost too open to feedback and ideas and too often I was leading a committee, putting an outline and ideas together instead of, I should just sit down, and that’s what I do now,” Khan said.
Before this year, he found himself reverting to his 2019 process when he was the chairman of the committee, still deciding what goes on the show but soliciting all the feedback from others and using that to craft the show.
The approach wasn’t working.
“I looked at myself in the mirror around Christmas 2024 the same way I did around Christmas 2019 and said I need to be accountable for everything that happens on the show and I should stop having so many meetings and I should just put the show together to be what I believe it should be,” Khan said.
AEW is in its first year of its new television rights deal with Warner Bros. Discovery, but we have yet to see the company’s live pay-per-views shift HBO Max; they currently air on Prime Video in the United States. Khan said he is “excited about the future” of pay-per-views on Max, but the technology and platform to do so on the streaming service is something that’s “absolutely being worked on right now.”
While fans wait for that, AEW continues to move forward toward Full Gear back in New Jersey later this year.