Question

Depends on the contract. Punk has a standard tippy top guy contract, with a downside guarantee of $1 million. That means WWE pays him a certain amount of money in exchange for Punk working a certain amount of dates, and if he hasn't hit $1 million by the end of the year after merchandise sales and royalties, then they pay him the difference to make it up. In this case, Punk already worked all the shows he was obligated to work and would have made WAY more than his downside after merch and DVDs long ago (somewhere in the 2-3 million range is a good guess), so neither side is actually obligated to continue with the contract at this point. So no, Punk is probably not getting paid, but he's also done fulfilling his side of the contract, so neither side would be breaching it. The same thing happened to WCW in 1992 with Lex Luger, when they made him World champion with a limited dates contract and then promptly wasted them all with Clash appearances and TV dates. This meant they actually had to renegotiate a new contract extension before he would appear at Superbrawl II to drop the title to Sting, and in fact he could have just sat at home if he wanted to! So this is actually not as unprecedented as it seems.