Chris Jericho offers up details on his cruise adventure.
In October 2018, the first-ever Chris Jericho's Rock 'N' Wrestling Rager at Sea set sail. Jericho first had the idea for the cruise back in 2015 after he was part of the KISS Kruise. He originally wanted NXT talent to be part of the cruise as he was still with WWE, but the company declined.
Instead, he partnered with ROH and secured other Independent talents.
Speaking on his Talk Is Jericho podcast, Jericho said he lost six figures on the first cruise.
"Huge success from a critics standpoint, huge failure from a financial standpoint. I lost a lot of money, six figures, but you're building yours business right? Anytime you build something, you have to be prepared to spend money to make money. That's what we did. I lost a lot of money and we put hours and hours of work into it and I did something I said I would never do, which is become a promoter. I'm in charge of booking all the talent and paying the talent, especially the first cruise, I paid all the talent. It's not easy because everyone wants to get a great pay off and I also want everyone to get a great payoff, but I'm also going over what my budget is. The second cruise, the financial deal was reconfigured to where I recouped my loss and made money on top of that," he said.
For the second cruise in 2020, Jericho was able to partner with AEW, airing a taped episode of Dynamite from the cruise. There were plans for AEW to air live in the middle of the third cruise, but things fell through.
"We never know what we're going to get with AEW until we're closer to the cruise. The crazy thing with this one was that, in August or July, TNT told us Dynamite would be preempted and moved to a Saturday. Originally, we thought it was great because we could do Dynamite live from the sea because that was our plan, originally. The first one was taped, but the second we were thinking of how we could do it live, being in port at the Grand Bahamas and it turns out that AEW decided to go in a different direction and doing it live just wasn't as feasible as we thought. When Dynamite got moved to Saturday, it meant it would conflict wth the cruise," he said.
AEW talent such as Britt Baker, Orange Cassidy, Ricky Starks, and more were part of the third cruise.
A late addition to the third cruise was Will Ospreay, who was added after other names had to pull out due to personal reasons or other commitments.
"We had lost some people and I got the idea for Ospreay because Minoru Suzuki was doing some work in AEW and I thought, 'How long is he in the States for?' I looked it up to see he had a couple of shows in the States during the cruise weekend, but Ospreay was also in the States and he wasn't working that weekend, so I called Will and asked if he wanted to go. He said, 'What do you want me to do?' I said, 'Just be there,'" recalled Jericho.
Jericho has already announced a fourth cruise, which sets sail in March 2022. You can view more information on the fourth cruise by clicking here.
Fightful will have live coverage of AEW Dynamite beginning at 8 p.m. ET on Wednesday.
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