During a recent AEW All Out media call, Tony Khan addressed creative control in the company and noted that not one person has creative control and that includes CM Punk.

"Not one person, including Mr. Punk and everyone on the roster, has creative control. It’s not like WCW and that is one of the issues with WCW. When you have a person who has creative control in their contract, it can hold up the show. I don’t know how you get through TV doing that. I can’t imagine if I had to deal with that. What I do have is a lot of people I want to sit down and talk to and hear what they want to say."

He also talked about Punk's return and debut with AEW:

"It doesn’t get much bigger than the return of CM Punk as a pay-per-view attraction. For us, we haven’t experienced anything like the interest we’ve had. Every business metric, whether it’s merchandising, the pay-per-view buys, or ticket sales for The First Dance and TV ratings are all at an all-time high, and it’s great because the business was already trending at an all-time high when he came in. Really, we took the hottest product in wrestling and made it even hotter with the arrival of CM Punk at the First Dance. Now, to come back and have CM Punk and Darby Allin one on one, I think it’s the most exciting thing we’ve ever presented and it’ll drive more business for us than anything."