John Cena was the guest on INSIGHT with Chris Van Vliet today. They spoke about a number of topics and one of the topics was when he started planning for his retirement tour.
Below is what Cena had to say about planning for his retirement tour:
“The whole thing was like three years. By then, I knew I had a lot of opportunities outside of WWE and those are very difficult to balance. Not just being everywhere. Like, the first half of this year for the tour, I was flying back and forth to Budapest and Morocco. Making PLE dates and man, I literally left into it the day I announced the Jan. 6th. I left to land in Budapest to shoot the next day. That’s a scheduling thing.
The biggest hurdle to climb is insurance. And insurance is super pricey. Like every date, the cost goes up whether it be 500,000 or 1,500,000. Because you’re doing a picture and you’re being like, ‘Hey I have Saturday off.’
That’s the thing a lot of folks don’t understand. It’s like but you have the weekends off, you can do this or like they can shoot Tuesday through Saturday if they want and you can do every Monday. You’re right. But the liability of, ‘Hey I’m doing this action movie and then I’m going to do albeit choreographed action, but with a high variable that I could get hurt.’ If I get hurt, I can’t come back to shoot or like if I get my nose broken or if I get a Black eye or something. Like, we’ve already captured these moments on camera and now I got to stop down and wait for the thing to heal before I can shoot another frame.
So, that’s something that I had to learn the hard way of like my schedule’s open. I can do it. It’s an insurance thing. And this is what it costs. So trying to get a studio to leverage that to let you go play stunt man is impossible. So, you got to a lot of times come out of pocket and that’s a tough balance. So, you come out of pocket to pay for the insurance to cover some of this. There are ways to get everyone to play nice and a great way to start a diplomatic conversation is saying I will invest.
Okay. So, whether it’s 100% of the cost or like, ‘Hey can you help us out? Can TKO help us out and I’ll chip in?’ Like, there’s a lot of way to be diplomatic. And when you want to do something, it’s not purely about financial gain. And with this year, it was like I thought I was going to take the whole year off for WWE but then when they said I only need you for 36 dates, a few opportunities came up and I was like, ‘Okay if I do the opportunities, I’m going to be on the hook for insurance.’ Insurance is this. So I knew what I was signing up for this.
Three years ago, I started getting these opportunities. And so I’m like I’m filming three maybe sometimes squeezing in four movies a year. I’m on set all the time, which means I can’t make any dates. And then I know my year in advance. These things go into pre-production earlier. So, you know kind of what you’re doing the next year. And then it’s like ’22 booked, ’23 booked, ’24 look pretty busy. Okay. In ’22, what if we outline ’25? Why do you wanna do that? Because I won’t be able to physically do it past 48. So in 2022, we kind of laid the groundwork for the idea of this. And then in early ’23, we pitched TKO. I say we, me and Dan, who is kind of my right hand man. And we pitched in the idea of a year.”
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