TKO President and Chief Operating Officer Mark Shapiro is enjoying the progression of WWE’s creative direction. The latest episode of The Main Event with Andrew Marchand featured a sit-down chat with Shapiro, where he spoke about how the company’s Chief Content Officer, Paul ‘Triple H’ Levesque, and President Nick Khan are moving things forward.
Shapiro noted that a lot of WWE Premium Live Event titles were created by former Chairman Vince McMahon. He said they needed to take the torch and move past that, which led Levesque and Khan to introduce the Wrestlepalooza Premium Live Event. Shapiro said securing the I.P. to Wrestlepalooza to sell event merchandise was a success.
“And yet, they’re open to new ideas. They never seem exhausted. They’re ready to take on a new shot, a new risk, a new opportunity. ‘Hey, Nick, let’s talk about launching a new event.’ Right now, a lot of our PLEs were created by Vince McMahon. We need to get in the business of taking that torch and moving past that, and Nick (Khan) and Triple H created Wrestlepalooza, which is the launch event for our new ESPN deal, which did incredibly well and may turn into a superfranchise,” Shapiro said. “Not to mention from a merch standpoint, I don’t need to tell you, securing the I.P. rights and then selling merch at Wrestlepalooza, let’s just say it was a real winner…”
The first-ever WWE Wrestlepalooza event took place on September 20, 2025, in Indianapolis, marking the kickoff of WWE’s new domestic media rights deal with ESPN. ECW first used the name for an event in 1995. The next Premium Live Event on the docket for WWE is Survivor Series: WarGames on November 29th from Petco Park in San Diego, California.
