It seems that Poison's plans to celebrate their 40th anniversary with a tour have hit a major setback. According to a recent report from Page Six, the band has officially shelved their highly anticipated reunion for their 40th anniversary due to a money dispute with lead singer Bret Michaels.
As fans had suspected, the rock band intended to reunite after four decades since their formation, but those plans came to a halt due to Michaels' demand for a 600% increase in his share of the earnings compared to his bandmates. "We had a great offer, I thought. But we left the table," drummer Rikki Rockett told the outlet in an article published on January 18. "It didn't work."
Rockett continued, "Really what it came to was C.C. [DeVille], Bobby [Dall], and I were all in, and I thought Bret was too. But he wanted the lion's share of the money, to the point where it made it impossible for us to even consider doing it. It's like $6 for every one of our dollars. You just can't work that way."
He added, "I don't do this just for the money. I do have a love for this, absolutely. But at the same time, you don't want to work really hard just to make somebody else a bunch of money."
Representatives for Michaels and Rockett did not immediately respond to Entertainment Weekly's request for comment. While the tour was never officially announced, fans had been eagerly anticipating dates ever since Michaels floated the idea in a Facebook post in 2024, calling 2026 "the perfect" time to mark 40 years since Look What the Cat Dragged In. Though he stated that nothing was set in stone, he also wrote that a limited run of shows appealed to him.
But no official announcement ever arrived, and in late 2025, Rockett hinted that plans for a tour had already imploded. During a conversation with Anthony Bryant on The Hair Metal Guru podcast, the drummer said there was an "awesome offer" on the table that was passed from him to DeVille to Dall, but that negotiations paused after the offer was handed to Michaels.
"We're at a point where I don't think we can get that tour to happen now," Rockett said in the November interview. "If by October you're not moving on a tour of that size [for the following summer], it's really, really hard to shoehorn that thing in and get it to happen. It's not impossible, but it's super, super hard."
Asked if he could personally reach out to Michaels to get an answer about the reunion tour, Rockett replied, "I have thrown out a text to all four members and said, 'Hey, let's figure this out. Let's do it.' And it was tumbleweeds. That's the kind of thing that is much bigger than just me throwing it out there on a text, cause there's a lot of money involved and stuff."
Rockett then clarified that things are not tense but "cordial" between the former bandmates. "There's not all this hate going around Poison, it's not that. It's frustration," he said. "'Hey, we wanna do this.' 'You wanna do this then.' 'You wanna this now.' It's that kind of stuff."
Poison, which formed in Pennsylvania in 1983, famously found success as one of the era's most popular rock bands. The band celebrated their first No. 1 hit single with "Every Rose Has Its Thorn," and gained acclaim for songs such as "Talk Dirty to Me," "I Won't Forget You," "Fallen Angel," and "Something to Believe In."
Speaking about the band's future, Rockett expressed hope that they can figure out the money issue by next year, joking that it would be "a perfect Poison folly to do a 41st anniversary tour."
