Is WWE Reviving NXT TakeOver?

This week’s WWE NXT signified major change was on the horizon for the company’s developmental brand. After a video package reflecting on the past year of NXT 2.0, it was revealed that the logo was being reverted back to a black, gold and white logo with the 2.0 moniker removed, giving fans hope that the “Black and Gold” era of NXT could be on its way back. There’s now another sign of that being the case, as Fightful Select reported on Wednesday that “Takeover shows are on the horizon” and that Halloween Havoc will be bumped up to a pay-per-view on Peacock this October. 

NXT used TakeOver as the branding for all of its pay-per-view events from May 2014 to August 2021. Many of the 36 shows under the TakeOver name are considered all-time great events among wrestling fans. Following the 2.0 relaunch NXT continued to run premium live events, but the TakeOver label was removed.

Triple H recently spoke with Ariel Helwani and discussed the NXT 2.0 changes that occurred over the past year. Many of the decisions that were made took place while “The Game” was recovering from near-fatal heart failure. 

“I didn’t necessarily agree with the creative direction sometimes and that had nothing to do with Shawn or anything else,” he said. “When I stepped away for health reasons, there was already pressure to change the direction and change what it was. I knew what the changes were. I don’t know that I necessarily agreed with all of them, but I do think that there are a lot of changes that happened that were extremely positive for the brand and I would have liked to have done anyways, that I think a lot of people would have gone, ‘No way he would have done that.’”

“The brand turned into something else, different from what the original intention was,” Triple H added. “Part of that was the success of it. Part of that was pandemic. The brand changed in the pandemic. People forget that for two years, maybe over that, we couldn’t recruit. I couldn’t train athletes. I had no place to train them. All of our training became a television studio to shoot RAW and SmackDown in. I had all these athletes under contract. Anybody that already didn’t fully understand what they were doing and how to execute it, wasn’t learning because there was no place for them to train. We medically weren’t even allowed to put them in the building to let them train, and if we wanted to, we had no place for them to train because the training facility was a television studio. That massively changed what it was. It massively changed where it was headed and what it would become.” 

h/t WrestlingNews.co & Fightful Select