Former WWE world champion CM Punk calls his upcoming appearance at Saturday’s WWE Wrestlepalooza event “a dream come true” because, for the first time in a decade, his wife AJ Lee returns to the ring — and the couple will team up against Punk’s arch-rival and professional wrestling power couple Seth Rollins and Becky Lynch.
But as much as says he will enjoy working with Lee in a co-featured bout, the 46-year-old Punk — whose given name is Phillip Jack Brooks — has one big problem with the upcoming event, the first in the WWE’s new five-year, $1.6 billion deal with ESPN.
The name.
Punk Calls Event’s Title ‘Ridiculous’
In an interview on the Pardon My Take podcast Wednesday, Punk made his feeling clear on how much he disliked the event’s title.
“I’ve been doing my best to not say the word Wrestlepalooza the entire time,” Punk, who has done multiple interviews to promote the event, said on the podcast. “That might actually be the first time I’ve said it. It’s a ridiculous name.”
“I’ve been doing my best to not say the word Wrestlepalooza the entire time. That might actually be the first time I’ve said it. It’s a ridiculous name.” – CM Punk 😭 pic.twitter.com/vhYxLRtGT8
— ❌KEIRAN❌ (@_XKEIRANX_) September 17, 2025
Name ‘WrestlePalooza’ Has Been Used Before
As Punk is certainly aware, however, Stamford, Connecticut, based WWE is not the first pro wrestling promotion to employ the name, which is clearly intended to evoke the iconic 1990s alt-rock music festival Lollapalooza.
From 1995 to 2000, the since-defunct Extreme Championship Wrestling (ECW) staged four shows under the label “Wrestlepalooza,” though only one, in 1998, became a pay-per-view broadcast — the standard way of broadcasting major wrestling events since the WWE, then still called the WWF, aired WrestleMania 2 via PPV in 1986.
The first WrestleMania event, in 1985, was carried primarily via closed-circuit television, meaning viewers purchased tickets to watch the broadcast in movie theaters and other, similar venues.
Punk Calls Pay-Per-View ‘Dead Technology’
The name WrestleMania has since become iconic itself, but that label was not even the original title of the annual WWE spectacular. The initial name proposed by wrestling entrepreneur Vince McMahon was “The Colossal Tussle,” an appellation that could also be described as “ridiculous.”
As much as Punk dislikes the name “WrestlePalooza,” he said on the Pardon My Take podcast that there is another term tied to Saturday’s event that is is trying get familiar with saying. That term is “Premium Live Event,” or PLE.
The core of the WWE’s massive contract with ESPN is its agreement to give rights to its PLEs to ESPN, mainly to air on the Disney-owned network’s new streaming app, ESPN Unlimited.
Starting next year, the WWE will abandon pay-per-view to stream WrestleMania exclusively to ESPN Unlimited subscribers. The same will hold true for other formerly PPV WWE events including Royal Rumble, Summer Slam, Survivor Series and whatever other “premium live events” the promotion comes up with.
“It’s our first PLE. I’m still trying to warm up to not saying pay-per-view,” Punk said on the Wednesday podcast. “Okay. My entire life it’s been pay-per-view. Yeah. But these are premium live events because pay-per-view is a a dead technology. It’s a big deal because it is the first one on ESPN. So, new partnership with ESPN — and it’s a big deal.”
The Wrestlepalooza PLE will stream live on the ESPN Unlimited app Saturday, September 20, at 7 p.m. Eastern Time. The card will be headlined by a grudge match pitting John Cena against Brock Lesnar.
Jonathan Vankin JONATHAN VANKIN is an award-winning journalist and writer who now covers baseball and other sports for Heavy.com. He twice won New England Press Association awards for sports feature writing. He was a sports editor and writer at The Daily Yomiuri in Tokyo, Japan, covering Japan Pro Baseball, boxing, sumo and other sports. More about Jonathan Vankin
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