In 1993, Shawn Michaels retained his Intercontinental Championship in the opening match of Wrestlemania IX, held at Caesars Palace in the former outdoor arena that had been home to several historic boxing matches. Nearly 17,000 pro wrestling fans watched “The Heartbreak Kid”—and later, watched Hulk Hogan regain the WWF Championship—live and in person during the first Wrestlemania event in Las Vegas.
In 2024, WWF has become WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment) and it may be more popular than ever. Wrestlemania is now a two-night mega-card and its 40th edition, held in April in Philadelphia, drew 145,298 fans to Lincoln Financial Field and millions of livestream viewers on Peacock. And it’s set to return to Las Vegas next year, April 19-20 at Allegiant Stadium.
Michaels, now a retired Hall of Famer and WWE senior vice president of talent development creative, doesn’t have to wait until 2025 to come back to Las Vegas. He oversees WWE’s NXT brand, a weekly TV show and sort of developmental league for up-and-coming pro wrestling performers, and NXT Battleground will become the first-ever WWE event at the UFC Apex in Las Vegas on June 9. Tickets are available at axs.com.
“This is so big for us, especially at NXT, to be the first individuals and the first brand from WWE to go out there and be in this state-of-the-art facility,” Michaels tells the Weekly. “We are so psyched we’re getting to go and be the first ones at UFC Apex. That for us is a historic moment in itself. But the card we’re bringing, it’s Wrestlemania [level]. It’s just going to be a really big night.”
Battleground is especially significant after September’s merger of UFC parent company Endeavor and WWE, creating TKO Group Holdings, a sports and entertainment conglomerate uniting the biggest brands in mixed martial arts and professional wrestling.
UFC opened the Apex, a 130,000-square-foot event and production facility along the southwestern Beltway, in 2019 to host small-scale fighting events and TV production, but the venue ended up being a godsend for the company during the COVID pandemic. Apex allowed UFC to continue to host and broadcast fighting events in a safe and controlled environment when most venues were shuttered.
The 1,000-capacity Apex has hosted other non-UFC events since then, including the XFL football draft, the Power Slap fighting promotion (owned by UFC CEO Dana White) and the recent Street League Skateboarding tour event. And UFC Fight Night will be back in the building on June 15, headlined by a flyweight bout between Alex Perez and Tatsuro Taira.
Las Vegas has long been known as the world’s fighting capital and the popularity of the hometown UFC has expanded that reputation beyond boxing, but pro wrestling—certainly more of an over-the-top form of entertainment than a true competitive sport—hasn’t been as prominent. Wrestling traditionally excels in Midwestern, Great Plains and Southern states, but not so much on the West Coast. The merger and the arrival of more and bigger sports and entertainment venues in Southern Nevada could change that.
One of the first live events with fans in attendance at Allegiant Stadium was also one of WWE’s biggest events coming out of the pandemic: SummerSlam in August 2021. It was that event’s first time in Las Vegas and the first time in 34 years SummerSlam had been held at an NFL stadium.
At the time, WWE president Nick Khan—who grew up in Las Vegas and graduated from Bonanza High School—told the Las Vegas Sun that the construction of Allegiant and the addition of T-Mobile Arena to a group of established Las Vegas arenas would hopefully open the door for more frequent WWE programming.
“Vegas has always been a city that attracts everybody. Certain cities attract regional or local folks but not national or international, and Vegas has always been that,” Khan said. “It’s also about how great T-Mobile and Allegiant are, and their proximity to the Strip shows the brilliance of both developers of those venues.”
Going international has always been a priority for WWE, although there’s been “a really big surge now to really embrace that we cover the world,” Michaels says. In recent months the promotion has taken its biggest stars to premium live events in France and Saudi Arabia, and next up is Clash at the Castle in Glasgow, Scotland on June 15.
“UFC and WWE, TKO as a whole is a global entity. We’ve really begun to see that over the last several months, and UFC has been going all over the world for quite some time,” Michaels says. “It’s amazing to me because I started out [wrestling] in a smaller [promotion] at the Showboat in Las Vegas, before Las Vegas was considered a global entity. But it has become that … and I can only imagine it will get blown off the charts next year at Wrestlemania.
“Las Vegas and Wrestlemania now is going to be so much bigger than Wrestlemania IX, which I was at. I’ve been doing this for 40 years, and every time I think I’ve seen it all, the WWE lets me know I have not.”
Another clear sign of WWE’s widening popularity are two massive new TV deals for the company’s Raw and Smackdown weekly live shows. The three-hour Monday Raw program will move from the USA Network to Netflix in January 2025, and Friday’s Smackdown show will shift from Fox to USA this September. NXT’s regular Tuesday program also lives on USA.
Las Vegas amplified a viral WWE moment during the leadup to this year’s Super Bowl as well. After a decade away from the ring, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson returned to wrestling and appeared to be lining up a Wrestlemania bout against his real-life cousin, champion Roman Reigns. They made an appearance with other WWE superstars at T-Mobile Arena on February 8, capturing the attention of international media in town for the Super Bowl three days later at Allegiant Stadium.
Some typical theatrics went down and Johnson ended up “turning heel”—becoming a villain—and teaming up with Reigns at Wrestlemania in Philadelphia. His comeback mirrored a bigger return to this world—in January, Johnson, a third-generation pro wrestling star turned actor, entrepreneur and media mogul, joined TKO’s board of directors. “Everything I touch … 100% there is a deeper meaning to it,” Johnson said on CNBC. “Joining this board was unique and different and special, in that I’m sitting at a board that my grandfather and dad helped build, and to help in building a company and growing it globally.”
That’s one of the recent WWE developments that has the company pointed in a new direction. Legendary promoter and former CEO Vince McMahon stepped down amidst scandal in January and is being investigated by the Justice Department for sexual assault and sex trafficking. Now maintaining creative control of is one of Johnson’s former in-ring opponents, Paul “Triple H” Levesque, who has focused on storytelling and giving fans new and old what they want.
“It’s not easy trying to be creative 52 weeks a year, but in my world I try to simplify it, and it’s just fun,” Michaels says. “It’s about being able to step away from the reality of the world sometimes, to fall in love with these characters and follow these stories, and truly be entertained.
“More than anything this culture now is about bringing it back to everyone, because it seems like everyone at one point in their life has had a time when they enjoyed WWE and it was part of their life. All we’re trying to do is bring that back.”
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