Former WWE Champion Chris Jericho spoke recently in an interview about how he loved working for WWE, but critisised their ability to build new stars.
The former WWE, AEW and WCW Champion appeared on “Wrestling with Freddie”, the podcast hosted by Hollywood star Freddie Prinze Jr. Prinze Jr was once a writer with WWE, and in his podcast tells stories of him time working for Vince McMahon and the troubles he had from Vince, John Cena and more.
Jericho, who hosts a podcast himself, made his appearance on the podcast this week to discuss all things to do with his wrestling career. He spoke about the creation of his band Fozzy and how his goal in AEW at first was to put as many people over. He cited his reason as looking at how WWE fails to build new stars and putting older wrestlers over their younger talent.
Chris Jericho on WWE failing to build new stars
This is not a WWE bash,” Chris began. “I worked there for almost 20 years and I loved working for WWE, but one thing they still have an issue with, and you can see it if you watch the show is building new stars. They really have a problem with that and I don’t know why.”
“Once again, it doesn’t matter what they do. From day one in AEW, when we showed up on October 2nd, and even before that when we showed up for the first couple PPVs, we had no television deal. Then when we finally got one on TNT, it was an ad revenue share. What that means for people that don’t know is you make the money based on the advertising. If you have 50 advertisers, you get a share. If you have one advertiser, you get a share. It was not a big monster deal,” Jericho explained.
“I realized early on kind of being the face of the company and the one guy the national audience knew besides Jim Ross, but the one guy that’s in the ring, and they knew Cody maybe but not really. Kenny and The Bucks were more independent or popular in other countries. I needed to make new stars as quickly as I could, Cody being one of them. Kenny Omega being another one.”
“You look at my first few programs. Match three in AEW was against Darby Allin. Jungle Boy was right around that time. Then Jon Moxley who had to be rehabbed when he came from WWE because Mox was not Mox when he first showed up. He was still Dean Ambrose, the goofy guy who wasn’t funny doing all the stupid sh*t they made him do. We had to make him into a star right off that bat.”
“All of those guys, if you look at the first six months pre-lockdown in AEW, I worked with all of them. So very quickly, we had 6, 8, or 10 guys shouldering the load. Four months after our first date, October 2nd, or three months, we went from an ad revshare to a contract I believe $160 million for 4 years because of the demos and ratings we got right out of the gate.”
Chris Jericho AEW Champion
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