Chris Jericho Reveals He Lost Money On First Rock ‘N’ Wrestling Rager at Sea Cruise

In the latest episode of Talk is Jericho (via Fightful), Chris Jericho revealed that he actually lost six figures on his first cruise, the Rock ‘N’ Wrestling Rager at Sea. He also noted that he wanted NXT to be a part of it when he first came up with the idea in 2015, but WWE passed on the idea. Here are highlights:

On losing money 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.”

On wanting to tape Dynamite on the cruise this year: “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 with the cruise.”

On getting Will Ospreay: “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.’