Required Viewing 02: Waterworld

We're in Wayne Media. We're in Wayne Media. Universal Pictures invites you to a world like none you've ever seen before. Kevin Costner. Waterworld.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to Required Viewing. I am one of your hosts, Chris Stashew of the Coultercast, the show that you can find this show on the sub feed of. And I'm joined by my good friend from somewhere on the face. Of a world covered in water. No, he's actually all the way from West Texas, which hasn't been covered by water yet in the world of our world, but in water world it had.

He's the professor of media and communications at Texas Tech, your friend and mine, Dr. David D. Perlmutter. Hi, Chris, and we are at 3,800 feet elevation here, so I'm not sure we have too much to worry about. That's right.

I agree. I want to set this podcast up because it has one of the the movie has one of the funniest openings of all time. So this show is called Required Viewing. It's a sub show. It's a feed.

It's a sub feed RSS within the culture cast. Dr. Perlmutter and I spend every episode doing a 360 degree film study looking at the films that we believe should be required viewing for whatever reason. And we give those reasons on the show from a 360 degree perspective. And I bet you're wondering why we're talking about Waterworld, because if you're a pertinent person of a certain age, you know about Waterworld.

But I just I wrote it down this time when I was watching it. And I want to do my best dramatic reading of one of the funniest intro narrations I've ever heard in a movie ever, which is the future. The polar ice caps have melted. Those who survive have adapted to a whole new world. Cue to Kevin Costner pissing in a jar.

And ladies and gentlemen, that's how we open Waterworld, a film that I think for most people is widely considered to be one of the biggest summer blockbuster bombs ever made. I have my own opinion on it. My opinion is a lot less important than the film itself. But I will say, if you have never seen this movie before, stop this podcast. Pause.

Go watch it. Because if you have only ever heard of it, based on its reputation that is not a fair way to make an assessment of a movie you have to watch it to have an informed opinion not informed as well I'm a filmmaker it's informed as in you've seen the movie and you can talk about it specifically so on this episode of required viewing we are taking a look at a film that for all intents and purposes is is not a film that would show up on most lists of required viewing or lists of movies to even watch. The list that this movie would be showing up on, and I think we both know this, Dr. Perlmutter, is biggest bombs of all time. Worst movies ever made.

But we, I think you and I, have a lot more opinions about it than just that. So, Dr. Perlmutter, I am going to, uh... Set up the film a little bit, and then I will ask you what your thoughts are. So the film is directed by Kevin Reynolds on a script by Peter Rader and David Tuohy.

It's produced by Kevin Costner, which is important because Kevin Costner is the lead in the film as the Mariner. It also stars one of my favorite actors of all time, Dennis Hopper. Also stars Mickey Blue Eyes' own Jeanne Triplehorn, Tina Majorino, and Michael Jeter, who at one point in his life got eaten by velociraptors in Jurassic Park 3. So the film is more or less, and I will say this very kindly because I don't think that this is an unfair comparison. Have you ever seen Mad Max?

You ever wanted to know what it would be like for Mad Max to be with boats instead of cars? That's Waterworld. So, Dr. Perlmutter, I am so very curious. Why oh why did you and I come to the conclusion that Waterworld was the film we're going to spend the next...

Let's call it our and some change talking about because most people would look at us and go Waterworld. That film came out in the mid 90s. Who cares in 2026? I think you and I will have plenty of reasons to show why it matters. But I am so infinitely curious, Dr.

Perlmutter. Why are we talking about Waterworld? I think in the. Past we've discussed how we weren't only going to have the film critics of France Association list of 100 greatest movies of all time as being required viewing, that they were films that were interesting and we could learn from, make observations about, that didn't fall into the category for almost anyone of great art. I mean, there certainly are films, and John Carpenter's original The Thing is a very good example, are films that just did not hit at their time.

And then over time built an audience and built appreciation and are considered to be excellent, you know, not masterpieces of a kind. This isn't one of them. There's no water world fandom. There's no demand for a sequel. There's no there's no demand for a TV series.

I don't think there's ever going to be a remake. I don't think there's been a reappraisal, but just looking at the film and then also the making of the film, the publicity space around Found the Film, you can understand some of the development of Hollywood that we have today, especially the era where so many films, the pressure is on to be a mega blockbuster and the high concept, the one-line elevator pitch sale, because, of course, this film was sold I found interesting that the cinematographer was the same one that did Mad Max, the road war. And it was basically sold as the road warrior on boats on the sea. And we're just starting at that one point there. You can understand and not necessarily disagree with the Hollywood executive circa 1995, you know, early 1990s going like, okay, you know, how many, how many hundred million do you need for it?

And it's got Kevin Costner, Kevin Costner at the time. I mean, now he's more of a TV icon with his success in Yellowstone. When he wants to be, I think is the way of putting it. I mean, he is the one that was like, paycheck, who needs, I'm out of here. But at the time there was hope in Hollywood that he would be a Mel Gibson and just star in big blockbuster after big blockbuster.

And I guess, after this film and The Postman didn't live up to expectations. Let's put it this way. The expectations were of a Road Warrior, Mad Max-type success. The film, I think, with everything, cost about $ 175 million in that money, the much more worthwhile money of the 1990s. I think it made it back, but of course, you know, Hollywood films are supposed to make maybe double what they cost.

So it wasn't like an all-time disaster. When it came out, I remember and I found in my research some funny things that two other films that are almost completely forgotten, the Warren Beatty, Dustin Hoffman comedy Ishtar, which famously cost a huge amount of money. So this was called Fishtar. I thought that was a pretty clever little, little Jape there. And then that's amazing.

That's amazing. By the way, what a, what a, like what a, what a well thought out insult, frankly, cheese. And this is pre, I mean, this is early internet, but like pre Reddit, pre social media. So somebody, some film critic, I have to, I have not found who, who coined the term there, but then also, uh, the other disaster of just a few years before really was heavens. Michael Chimino's heaven's gate, uh, which has gotten a sort of reappreciation.

You see stuff about it. I'm not on Team Heaven's Gate, but it was called Kevin's Gate. The Waterworld. Also amazing. My God.

Pre-internet people, their pun game was down pat, apparently. Yeah. And there were so many fewer of them. There is a, and I really love this, there is a Ulysses cut of this movie. Which is the one that I watched, by the way.

Yes. Yes. And now, I watched it in a theater. And I wanted to. No.

Because I wanted this. This was a big. At that time, the big-budget, big-screen blockbuster was rarer and there was more hype because there was less hype, if I can put it that way. Now, if somebody said to me, yeah, there's a big you know, Superman or Marvel big, big blockbuster coming out, I would maybe I've aged out of that. But no, thank you.

There's one every 15 minutes. Back then, it was more of a big deal. And I, you know, I love Jaws and I loved Road Warrior and. Indiana Jones. And I think there was hope that this would be some sort of a franchise like this.

So there's a required viewing and sort of understanding the mechanics of why Hollywood started really with Spielberg and Lucas kicking them off. This idea of like, if we spend $ 175 million, we can make $ 3 billion. Whereas it used to be Hollywood, we'll spend $ 20 million and we'll make $ 50 million. And so the blockbuster mentality that we still live in today and that to some extent, affects streaming services as well, where every streaming service, Prime, Apple, HBO, whatever, wants to make some sort of super big budget productions that sort of are the flagships of their streaming. You can see some of the lessons coming from Waterworld.

So we'll talk about the movie, but I think it's interesting to talk about, like, production and publicity and reviews as the early, early internet era that it came from? So I was five when the film came out. I don't remember seeing it. I don't remember hearing anything about it. I remember seeing it, let's say, when I was in my mid to late teens.

And to your point, as someone who came to it very much later on, Then when the film came out, I did not know at that time the kind of I wouldn't say that the fervor around it, but definitely the kind of expectations versus reality versus what everyone was hoping for versus what the studio was hoping for. versus what clearly Costner, who was one of the producers, was hoping for. And in my research, I found the same things that you did. Heaven's Gate, Ishtar, One from the Heart, which Coppola mortgaged Zotrope against and lost the studio because of. And then the other one that also comes to mind is Sorcerer, the Friedkin film, where it was... this whole thing, whole hullabaloo about, you know, the shoot and it came out after Star Wars and it made like no money.

I mean, look, Sorcerer, in the years since the film has come out, has been reappraised as a true Friedkin classic, which is great, because Sorcerer is a great film. If you haven't seen it, go check it out. It's about a bunch of guys driving trucks in the Dominican Republic full of, I think, nitroglycerin, if memory serves. It's a great film. We will do that.

We're going to do the Wages of Fear and Sorcerer together. The French film was... A true, true classic. Oh, right, the one that it's originally based on, right? And then there's also Baron Munchausen, which also gets kind of lumped into this because, again, you know, double the budget.

Columbia wanted nothing to do with it. It's like a two-hour long movie. And it before it even and this is the weird thing right and I know that you are a professor of media and communications I initially went to school for journalism so I have similarly to yourself and I don't have as much of a background in journalism as you do but I had that journalistic drive early on that yes I understand this movie had its failures. But the press and the media surrounding film dictates so much of the public's response then, not so much now. And because of the Internet, because of the kind of democratization and the proliferation of, you know, someone like yourself and myself sitting on the Internet, we have the ability to reach people to talk about films the way that Siskel and Ebert and friends used to. have kind of the only channel to the public.

And so now that there is a wider, again, further democratized channel of people to talk about things, things like, like I just mentioned, Baron Munchausen, which is considered to be one of Terry Gilliam's best films, Sorcerer, which, like we've already alluded to, is a great film. The films that have come out that were taken out by the studio ahead of time because they went over budget or... you know what have you these movies have now been given a second life because look as time goes on these movies don't just disappear if it's been released it's still out there you can still watch it and it the the hope is it will eventually find an audience if you're a filmmaker and your film doesn't succeed initially, your hope is in the long run, your film finds an audience.

That being said, I think Westworld is one of those films. Just to give my personal thoughts on it, the very small amount of personal thoughts that I need to give, because again, this is not a show about subjectivity as much as objectivity, frankly. Waterworld. I enjoy, to give my personal, subjective, minor thoughts on Waterworld before we talk about the film specifically and the things surrounding it, I enjoy Waterworld a fair amount. I actually think it's a pretty good movie.

Does it have problems? Sure. And I think the problems in a lot of ways are the same problems you could level against any other film that creates a world that feels very unlike our own and what the film doesn't do. And I think that, again, you can lambast it for this or you can praise it for this. It does not have training wheels on it at all.

The opening narration of the world is covered in water. People have to adapt to survive. That's it. We find out more about the world through the narrative and the film itself. And I, as someone who watches a lot of film, I appreciate that.

I appreciate that the film is not like exposition dumping every five minutes about the world and the way the world is and why the world is. The people in this world don't know. know why Waterworld is the way that it is and I appreciate that conceit immensely because it shows a trust in the audience that look you've seen a film like this before like you've already alluded to if you've seen Mad Max you kind of have already seen this movie in a lot of ways and I appreciate that this movie doesn't take it upon itself to spend half an hour explaining the whys and whos and whats of Waterworld we just get to understand the world is covered in water and And the world is covered in water. And that's and that's about it.

And they're looking for dry land. I appreciate about that, about this movie. But I can understand if you're watching this movie in the mid 90s, how you just don't resonate with it at all. because they're not giving you... It's not that they're not giving you a lot to go on, but what they're not giving you is everything laid out immediately so you understand the world. The world is kind of growing before you as the viewer, and you're kind of getting to see it as it unfolds.

And for a lot of viewers, that is not something that they want. They want to, and we've talked about this before, go into a movie knowing everything, understanding everything, not wanting to feel like they're out of sorts with the filmmaker. and Waterworld that I kid you not more or less happen without any explanation. There's parts where Kevin Costner is being dumped into what we assume is some sort of sulfuric tar pit maybe? Who knows? I don't know and it's not explained.

There are things that happen that aren't explained and for me as a viewer it doesn't bother me but for a large portion of the other viewership of the people saying this film, I don't think they resonated with it. And I'm also going to say just outright here, because this is the other piece of subjective opinion that I need to get out of the way before we talk about the movie proper. I don't like Kevin Costner as an actor. His stylings, his acting stylings are not my cup of tea. They never have been.

I don't vibe with him the way that I think a lot of other people do, because clearly he's been very successful. Like you mentioned, Yellowstone, Whole host of things. Kevin Costner, not my bag. That being said, perfectly cast in a role where he has to be an aloof drifter. Doing, and I think you would agree, doing his best Clint Eastwood man with no name bit.

That's kind of what this movie is. Like, Mad Max gets a name, sure. But Mad Max is in that same vein of Clint Eastwood's The Man With No Name, going from town to town, dealing with problems that need to be dealt with, but not staying in one place too long and then going off on another adventure. If that's what you're casting Kevin Costner for in this movie, that was, I kid you not, like the most perfect casting possible. For someone like Costner, because Costner is his aloofness works in this.

So all of my subjective stuff aside, I understand why this film objectively was a, quote, failure out of the gate. But man, have you seen a movie that's as creative as this one in the last 10 years that does all the things that this film does, like that creates a world that feels lived in? in a way that it's very hard to do this successfully. And to drag a movie for the things it got dragged for seems a little bit unfair, because that was kind of the intention of the movie. And yes, I know, and it would seem that this movie was a launching point for other things that never came to be. But for me, just sitting down to rewatch this movie in 2026...

I feel like anyone who watched it in this day and age would be like, what a wild movie. Look at all these practical effects and look at all these boats and people popping up from under the water on ski-dos and flying through the air on jet skis and stuff. It's out of control, the amount of stunts, Practical stunts that they were doing in this film and I feel like in 1995 people then probably took that for granted a little bit because they don't make movies like this anymore period and if they do they cost four times. the budget of this movie. The fact that this movie was made for $ 175 million is pretty crazy to me. So...

Well, in those dollars. I mean, I think that's probably like $ 350 million now, I would assume. But it looks better than Dial of Destiny. It looks better than a lot of the new things that are coming out in this day and age. I want to talk about something you said there.

And this is something, I guess, an angle of attack that we're going to take in required viewing. So. My perspective as a teacher is that quite often I'm, when I'm in the classroom, standing there and I'm showing, say, a clip from a movie to students, a TV show, video game, something, web page, TikTok video, and I get a sort of unique opportunity. And it started way back in the late 80s when I was a graduate student in the film class. And then 1995 is when my career actually began as a professor at LSU, assistant professor on the tenure track at LSU School of Communication.

And I remember I taught the intro class, which I still teach today, the intro class in our field in 1995. And I taught in this gigantic auditorium, like 500 students. Just imagine all just sitting there looking at you. And a lot of people felt uncomfortable doing that. But for fun, I considered it to be like super fun.

I mean, certainly to keep track of them and also keep their attention was a wonderful challenge, and I still look forward to it. But the point was that I could look at them as they looked at something, right? So I could show a clip from an older movie at that time. I could show a clip from Lawrence of Arabia. And I could watch 518-year-olds looking at what was then about a 25-year-old movie.

And. Where are their eyes going? You know, are they paying attention? Are they, they, this was not the era of the smartphone, but like I had students who had the comics from the newspaper and just flapped them out and started reading the back row. So that, I mean, there were, there were signals that people, people weren't paying attention.

And I still, when I go to the theater, the rare times I did, but certainly back then I would look and see the reaction of an audience. And so it's important to, in this 360 view that we ask ourselves what we're doing while we're watching a movie. So now studios, creators have this problem of the second screen, right? And we get a feeling that a lot of movies, TV shows, everything are made with this nervousness that the audience is no longer looking at our production, but they're looking at their phone. Right.

And, So what do we do? And Richard Haddam, our good friend, made this really great comment. He said the reaction should be what we put on the screen should be better to get the attention. Right. I think there's a lot of other people in Hollywood who would say, well, we've got to have something on the screen that allows these people to look at their phone at the same time. and not miss anything, right?

So that's where the over-explanation and repetition and underlining comes from. But when I saw this in a theater in 1995, I could edit my encounter. So I remember my goal whenever I went to a theater to see a movie was that I didn't read any review. And you could do that in 1995. You could simply say, okay, the local news, it's in a I'm a little late.

I think, I think I didn't see it until like three weeks after it came out and I had to worry because it left pretty soon. So I've, I may have seen it in its last showing in Baton Rouge, but I remember going like, I'm, I'm not going to read the paper. I'm not going to read. Time magazine or news a week review because it was, because it was given Kevin Costner in a big budget film. It got reviewed.

Everybody reviewed it. The local TV. I remember watching local TV news, which was something back then. And I, I actually turned off the news because they were just about to do a review of Waterworld. So I put off as much as I could.

A little bit of the culture leaked. So I already heard some like, oh, yeah, it's a flop or something like that. But it wasn't today where like 15 minutes after an episode of a streaming show or a movie opens, You already have a massive tide. And then you've had, we didn't have the long tail that we do now, right? So Supergirl opened, but there were three months of saturation discussion about Supergirl before it opened.

We didn't have that. In these stories about troubled production on Waterworld, you could ignore those. I actually did not know that there was any troubled production on Waterworld. because I'd avoid reading any articles about Waterworld. So I went in there with that innocent eye that I've talked about before, and I just looked at a movie. And I remember coming out and going, and I honestly forget, I don't have my ticket stub.

I usually save ticket stubs. I couldn't find that. I was going to try to show the ticket stub from Waterworld 1995 as a historical document. I couldn't find it, but I think I paid like five bucks to go see this movie. And I remember walking out and saying, yeah, that was worth five bucks.

That was worth five bucks in two hours of my time. You know, thrills, chills, spills, as they used to say. Stuff happening on the big screen. It was a big screen movie. I mean, it wasn't, this was not a coffee house movie.

This was, you know, lots of big explosions and boats sailing off. It was different because we'd seen a hundred variations of like fast cars crashing into each other and, you know, bombs on, on earth. And so the, the whole water thing. So I got my five bucks in 1995 and, and I didn't think this was ever going to be a film I'd show in class, but for its great artistry, but I gave it credit for entertaining me, which is all I was asking for, for, for this film. And that really sums it up is that, is that, I think this film would have been well served by just people getting to go to the theater, pay five bucks and go, okay, yeah, that was a great way to spend two hours, you know, fun.

There were, there were so many flaws. There were problems. There were plot holes. There were, Performance gaps. I felt that they did these weird topical references, which you should never do at a post-apocalyptic movie.

One specific one, even. I mean, one I completely... I mean, you know, where you have Dennis Hopper as related to the captain of an oil tanker that had famously crashed and lost a lot of oil. And yet, even in 1995, because this hadn't happened just recently. I think there was a groan in the theater of like that.

Wait a minute. We don't know when this is taking place, right? I read online somewhere that in the script or some production materials, this is supposed to be the year 2500. Which is like. Which is how many years?

500 years past the Exxon Valdez happening? Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's like making a Meghan Markle joke in Star Trek or something. Right. Like, I just, what?

You know, okay. Well, if you're going to do it, make it a joke. Like, what comes to mind is Spaceballs, right? In Spaceballs, they have... In the far-flung future, they're still making Rocky movies and stuff like that.

Normally, it's used as a gag to show that the culture hasn't progressed any further than it is now. In this movie, it is groan-inducing, some of the things that they've done, because it just... It reminds you that this script was being written not by people now, but it's being written for the expectation that the people now are going to get the joke. It's not future-proofing it for anyone in the future. Because if you were to watch it in 2026 and you weren't someone, let's say, between your age, my age, or maybe a little younger than me, does Exxon Valdez even mean anything to you?

Yeah, this goes back, and we're going to try to write some rules for people doing say, post-apocalyptic films set in the future. And one of the rules I've just heard over and over again, and I've said it at least once in the show before, is that never specify units of computer memory, never specify money in your fantasy or science fiction. Of course, the film series did did do exactly what you're saying, just like with Fates Balls was Austin Powers, right? Where he says, you know, I'm going to hold the world for ransom for $ 1 million. And that was the joke about the idea of, you know, $ 1 million being worth something once upon a time there instead of a trillion dollars.

But even today, he said a trillion dollars, maybe 20 years from now, people would laugh at like, what? You mean like one. Candy bar worth of American money or something like that? I want to talk about Kevin Costner just a minute because you raised him. I'm not Kevin Costner negative.

I think he's one of those actors that needs to be in a certain type of role in a certain type of production. There's no question he does not have the charisma of the traditional actors. Steve McQueen or Mel Gibson action star. Thank you for mentioning Mel Gibson, because that's the one that came to mind with this Mad Max-esque film. Right.

He's quiet. He has a thin voice. He's not physically imposing. These are not negatives if you're in the right kind of role. Like, I actually watched all of the Yellowstone series.

I was disappointed in the directions it went, but I enjoyed the series. Again, I don't know if it was Waterworld adjacent and it was lots of crazy, interesting things happening that sort of rewarded your hour of watching an episode, but he was very good as the family patriarch who came on the screen every once in a while and said some pithy aphorism or, you know, said something that, you know, sort of summed up the moment and then you took them off the screen and then other people did the action. In fact, they had several other stars who were the designated action stars. It's sort of like Star Trek New Generations, at least what it was supposed to be, where Picard would be this sort of cerebral sitting back and the Kirk role was, would be played by Commander Riker.

They mixed that up pretty quickly. They didn't follow through on that, where they have Picard going off on missions and everything. But I think that's the kind of role he does well in. And unfortunately, he became labeled as an action star, so they put him in movies like The Postman and Waterworld, where he's supposed to carry the movie by his star power. And it just physically doesn't work.

Again, going back to voice, it doesn't, you know, Mel Gibson, for whatever other things he is, man, can he carry off a line in an action film star role line? Like his voice is very resonant, right? Right. And you can, Harrison Ford, you know, I remember a hundred quotes from Harrison Ford saying, Some of them are memorable quotes. Also, it's Harrison Ford saying those.

Right, right. Get off my plane is not a line that really works. Other actors say it, but when he says it to Gary Oldman at the end of Air Force One, it has that resonance to it. Get off my plane. Kevin Costner, for me, it's not that he's a wet blanket, but like you've already alluded to, I think my issue with someone like Costner and the thing that I look at, because you've already mentioned it twice, and I think it almost bears kind of having a minor side tangent about The Postman is the other big 90s epic that was a failure, a financial failure.

And guess what those two films have in common? They're both Kevin Costner-led film. I have not seen a lot of other Kevin Cost- Robin Hood. Robin Hood, yeah, which is great. I think it did box office, but he wasn't Robin Hood.

Well, he's not the best part of that movie. The best part of that movie is Alan Rick. I mean, Alan Rickman is just chewing the scenery as the Sheriff of Nottingham, which is why that movie is so good, is because- the villain in it is chewing the scenery and we're not asking Kevin Costner to do the heavy lifting. This movie almost gets there because man, Dennis Hopper is chewing the scenery. And that's, I think that ends up being with these Kevin Costner movies that I've seen in terms of having a conversation about like, what does success look like in terms of casting Kevin Costner in a movie, you can cast Kevin Costner in a movie as this kind of stoic hero if the villain is just operating at 11.

He's over the top. He's bombastic. He's loud. He's brash. He's, you know, in this film, he takes no prisoners whatsoever.

Kevin Costner just doesn't seem to be the kind of actor who... The energy that he brings to things is not an animated energy. He reminds me a lot of William Hurt in that regard. I know Kevin Costner is a great actor. It's not that he's not a good actor.

It's just the energy that he brings to the roles that he is in, especially as the lead, the expectation is not that he's going to be a house of fire on screen. He's going to be, again, playing that kind of Clint Eastwood-style role. I would compare Costner to Clint Eastwood in a lot of ways. But Clint Eastwood has a fair amount of charisma to him. Kevin Costner doesn't have a lot of charisma.

And that, for me, I feel like. I'm not going to say that's the reason this movie failed, because that's not the reason this movie failed. Like we've already alluded to, Kevin Costner was a known quantity... He was a financial success in terms of casting him in things in the 90s. I think, and you've already alluded to this, we have this issue of the studio got frustrated that the movie doubled in budget.

And instead of keeping quiet about it, which, by the way, I'd like to point out, If you're a director or an actor or you do that before the movie comes out, you don't get to work in Hollywood again. You don't get to play ball with the studios because the studios are going to look at you and go, why in God's name would we put someone in charge of a movie or cast in a movie that's not going to sit and defend the movie outright? or say how great the movie is even if they know that the movie is incontrovertibly a failure or not great why are the actors not allowed to do that but the studios are i i think of josh trank directing that fantastic four movie that came out a couple years ago with uh miles teller and michael b jordan josh trank came out before the movie came out and said this movie is awful like This movie is not good.

Don't go see it. Josh Trank hasn't directed a movie since. He lost the ability to direct the Boba Fett movie for the Star Wars franchise that he had been given because he went out of his way to talk about the fact that the movie that was coming out that had his name on it was not representative of the movie he had created. And he has been more or less blackballed. The fact that the studios are allowed to do that and cause something like Westworld to to more or less not even be given a fair shake out of the gate and there's no repercussions for them is a wild concept to think about because it's effectively the, you know, well, it's the, you know, if it's the boss's fault, it's not really my fault.

It's the people who work for me's fault. I won't take responsibility for it. That's kind of what it smacks of. Another lesson from this film, Chris, is one you've just raised is that I don't, Defend the classical studio era on all counts. There's a lot of horrible things that went on.

A lot of people were treated very badly. A lot of behavior that should be illegal was normalized. Definitely groups didn't get represented on screen very well, but control can. Be a good thing. And so like, you know, Gone with the Wind, which made a zillion dollars and is still considered to be one of the greatest movies ever made in terms of production.

You know, the shooting of The Burning of Atlanta was troubled. I mean, anytime you do anything big, right, with like a thousand actors. Cecil B. DeMille, the Ten Commandments, the Israelites crossing the Red Sea, troubled. I mean, that's what it would be called today.

But it was just, it was hard. It was really hard to pull off big action sequences with impractical effects days. And we need to keep saying that, that when you're seeing the boats jumping over other boats here, it's like that 80s and 90s, 70s, 60s James Bond, where you're really like, wow, some stunt guy was actually in that car doing a 360 flip over the river. And I remember as a kid going to a James Bond movie because, oh, what's going to be the big stunt? And you knew it wasn't going to be a CGI stunt.

Today, there's no anticipation. Again, I can enjoy a film like the special effects in something like Project Hail Mary because I just, oh, those are really nice special effects, but I don't go like, oh my gosh, you know, how'd they risk Ryan Gosling's life like that? Right. There's none of that anticipation there. And you respect Kevin Costner.

And we haven't talked about Gene Triplehorn yet, who is a very, very excellent act, excellent casting choice, very dignified. And play is actually better than some of the people cast in Mad Max. We should talk about that, too. There's actually some improvements over Mad Max Road Warrior here. Which which, you know, should be credited to this film.

But the point being that this was maybe the beginning of the era where people got on these roles of either trashing a film or maybe overly praising the film and not accepting that there was maybe some middle ground and you could just enjoy your five bucks. Well, and, you know, we've talked about this a little bit before, and I feel like we're probably going to, I mean, not bemoan this is the right word, but I would say bring this up from time to time. We lived in a time and a place from, let's call it the 80s through the early 2000s of thumbs up or thumbs down. binary ratings for films is reductive when it comes to art it's immensely reductive when it comes to art frankly to go and look at a piece of artwork in terms of a painting or a anything anything that is visual that is not a moving image so a painting a mural, you know, a visual representation of something, and to look at it, and I won't say the line, but if you've seen Always Sunny, and you've seen Danny DeVito wearing a white wig in Always Sunny, walking through an art gallery, and looking at pieces of art, derivative, derivative, derivative, BS, derivative, like, that kind of criticism, especially one that was being proffered by Siskel and Ebert, it, what it smacks of is it smacks of a general misunderstanding of what you said just now there doesn't have to be good or bad is almost unimportant when it comes to enjoyment of a film if you didn't like the movie cool that does not affect the quality of the film your ability to like a movie doesn't bears no bearing on the quality of the film itself.

All it means is you didn't resonate with the film. There was something about the film that you did not like. There was something about the film that didn't strike a chord with you or struck a discordant tone with you. I have already said it multiple times now and it bears repeating. I don't like Kevin Costner as an actor at all.

But in Waterworld, I like him in this role and I appreciate the film immensely because he's in it and what he is doing is exactly what is needed. in this film it's exactly what the film's script is asking for a quiet stoic no-nonsense drifter who has been on his own for who knows how long and he will continue to be so because again by the end of the film thankfully the film just goes he's off back on his own again and you know what good I know why they did it's because there was a sequel or they were hoping for a sequel to turn this into a franchise you know Waterworld 2 and 3 and you know whatever All of that aside to boil something down to a pure binary. I didn't like it because again, like you, we can't, the reductive nature of criticism cannot continue in that direction anymore.

In this day and age, you have to be willing to look at a film and go objectively. This is a great film. It's well-made. It's well executed, but subjectively, I didn't like it. Okay.

To your point, the studio did not give anyone who went and saw this film a subjective chance to enjoy it because it was already over budget and it took forever to come out. None of that has any bearing on the quality of the film. I have seen films... that took less time to make, less money, that were 10. Times worse than this film. Not even.

Way. So unappealing that I wouldn't even re-watch them if you asked me. I would re-watch Waterworld with... I would rather watch this than several other films like it because, again, there is... interesting weird things going on are they all explored to the fullest to the extent no and is that a failing of the movie yes in some way because the clearly expectation was we'll get another opportunity down the road to explain some of this there was none of that obviously but To have this much creativity on screen in a practical setting should not have just been overlooked as, well, that's just the way things are. Like, there may not always be things like this being made.

So to appreciate it for what it is at the time feels a little myopic to just go, well, it was over budget, and so therefore it's not successful. Like, I don't know about that. Yeah, and it's something that we all... of us who enjoy media criticism, and again, this is part of the 360, is sort of self-analysis as well as analysis of what's on the screen and what we've been told about what's on the screen. But we have to always remember that it's okay to just enjoy something, right? I mean, we agree.

I mean, I think one of the reasons I reached out to you long ago was that I said to myself, oh, here's somebody who stands up for the right for an audience to just enjoy a film without there being a message, a deep meaning, a crane shot that was taken from Nosferatu and refers to John Ford's The Searcher. You don't need the layers of film criticism or appreciation or illusion. You can just pay five bucks, sit in the theater, you're going on a date, you're going to go see it almost seems like something from another age to say like, you know, go pay 10 bucks for dinner and five bucks each, you know, 20 bucks total, go see a movie, enjoy the movie, talk a little bit about the movie, maybe forget the movie a month later.

It doesn't haunt your dreams, but it's just fun on the screen. And that's, that's what this movie fulfilled in 1995 for little old me. And I think that, Today would probably do the same because it's interesting in terms of how a movie ages, right? So certainly I think today Jaws ages so well. You can see Jaws today and you can get some of the same reaction that people, including me, did in the theater watching Jaws.

Indiana Jones, the first movie, absolutely. Star Wars, absolutely. This is one of those films that I would put on the list, especially because all these effects were basically practical effects. It's interesting, by the way, practical effects age well when they're done well. They really do, don't they?

It's hilarious to me how you look at effects from the 90s that aren't practical and you're like, good Lord, that's awful. Other than Jurassic Park, that seems to be like the high bar, the high watermark, like everything... still gets compared to Jurassic Park, and I think fairly so. But you're right, the practical effects in this film are really astounding in a lot of ways. The level of creativity and, I think, wherewithal that went into the practical effects in this film should be lauded beyond belief, frankly. Yeah, and so I think that's one of my, and we're not wrapping up yet, but I mean, one of my takeaways is that we are perfectly fine with what used to be called a popcorn film, a summer film that you don't ask too much from.

That said, there are some moments of like impressive depth here. And I want to talk about some of the little moments, because when you talk about a massive blockbuster, you tend to refer to the big set piece action events. But let's talk first, as I just mentioned, Jean Triplehorn, who is a excellent, excellent actress who doesn't get enough work. I saw her most recently as a government minister in The Terminal List with Chris Pratt. And, you know, The Terminal List was the modern streaming version of a popcorn action.

There's lots of shooting and revenge and It was fine. It was absolutely fine. She brought this dignity and gravitas and this layeredness to the villain, one of the villains of the film, that only a great actor can do. And here, she's playing a tough role, right? She's a woman who's sort of stuck in this situation.

She's trying to protect this child. we're not pretending that she's Supergirl or Captain Marvelette, that she can do all these amazing physical things. She has to, through her brains and her stalwartness, convince this guy who obviously is pretty burnt out and not trusting the people that, hey, I need you to help me to do this thing and protect this child. And again, she just brings this The centeredness to the role. And it's always a joy when there's a certain actor or actress that you know is just going to take a part that maybe it's not the minor part, but she is not like the co-lead of this film. She wasn't booked that way and she isn't that way, but she just sort of helps the film along and adds to it. the this centered this indignity is there at the same time as all the crazy stuff going on with the boat chases and explosions.

And I would also say as well and this is a thing that you know for me is a big not a big no no but I'm just not the biggest fan primarily because of the way that they're written in a film with children but Tina Majorino plays the child at the center of all of it because she has a tattoo on her back which shows where dry land is. She is great as well in allowing Kevin Costner to be humanized as a character and showing a side of his character that is more interesting in terms of where the film could go and what the film could be doing. And I think that Tina Majorino as Enola, I think, also really works in the film's favor because, again, if you think about a film like Fistful of Dollars or For a Few Dollars More or The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, I mean, again, we have a similar character here with the Mariner.

Like he's just, you know, he's very put upon. He just, you know, comes into town, deals with thing and leaves. And he's, you know, he's not sticking around. He's just there to, you know, right the wrongs or, you know, stand up for quote, good, unquote. Whatever you want to call that.

And I like that we have the child character played by Tina Majorino, who just helps with that humanization of the Kevin Costner character, because without it, I think, and again, his character is a flat character because that's kind of the expectation, but we get to see those moments with him and her. And again, it just, it reminds me that When you actually in these films have a character like that and you have them interacting with your main character, it allows your main character to have a little bit more depth than they would have otherwise. And again, not saying that the man with no name doesn't have any depth but you get some depth with this character that the man with no name doesn't have because he's not interacting with a whole bunch of different kinds of people in those films he's pretty much interacting with desperados outlaws and lawmen and Maybe some, you know, I think in the first one he's I forget there's probably a woman there in one of those films or at least two of them.

But in this one, like you said, Jan Triplehorn is given I wouldn't say a lot of agency, but she's given a lot of pushback on Kevin Costner's character, which is so smart for this script. Because, again, I was reading some of the reviews from when the film came out and it was like, oh, it's a cheap rip off of Mad Max. Which one? Which one has Mad Max with children running around and stuff like this? Like Mad Max Fury Road, maybe not really like the comparisons to other things, again, feel derivative, not allowing a film to exist on its own merits and comparing it to other things and saying, well, it's not as good as Mad Max or it's a rip off of Mad Max.

That is just derivative criticism that serves no purpose. and doesn't allow a film to exist within its kind of own world that it's created. You know, to say this film had toxic buzz surrounding when it came out is being kind. I can't imagine for the life of me what the point of telling everyone the budget on this film ballooned twice of what it needed to be and that was enough to cause people to not go see it. That is a very pastoral reason to not go see a film. Let's put it that way, especially in 2026.

I mean, in the wake of something like Ghostbusters 2016, where it was, oh, it's a female Ghostbusters and all the incels are going to not go see it. No, the movie wasn't funny. That's why people didn't go see it. Waterworld, for me, I'm trying to understand what the film's problem is that would have caused this fervor and backlash towards it. Because if you watch the film, if you actually watch the film, like you've already alluded to, Why is if we can assume when we go out to eat that there are multiple courses at a restaurant and you don't order the calamari as a meal because you have to order five plates of calamari to be full.

Why can't you just have a movie that's the equivalent of of a hamburger at McDonald's? It's just it satisfies the need and it doesn't need to be any more than that. And if it is great. Yeah, and I started out, we both said that this was an original premise, right? I mean, the one sentence, road warrior on water, is not ridiculous.

It's like, oh yeah, you know, we could do this in water. And here's the test, okay? 30 years later, people are still lining up by the thousands to see Waterworld, except... It's the Waterworld Stunt Show. And thank you for mentioning that.

Still after 30 years, you can go to Hollywood and you can see the Waterworld at Universal Studios. And they have another one in Japan. And they have another one in Beijing. And in Florida. What movie?

Yeah, I think there was one in Singapore that would close. I was looking up. I only heard... I had until this morning... I'd only heard about the one in Universal Studios and I was going like, oh my gosh, that's just amazing that, you know, that, I mean, what other film?

I mean, yes, there's Harry Potter World, right? And there's still other blockbusters have their thing, right? But for a film that was supposed to be a failure, and this is why I don't think the movie lost might, because if you count 30 years of people paying tickets to go see, you know, 3,000, some of these arenas are like 3,000 people can go see it, more than my 500 students, then it must have broken even by now. I mean, that's another interesting thing is that maybe this film helped create this other revenue stream. Star Wars famously created the toy revenue stream, right?

Like nobody, when the Godfather came out, said, oh, we've got a big hit. Okay, let's have some action dolls of, you know, Sonny and Michael and, you know. Sonny with your real, real, real hole filling action. Yeah. I remember, you know, I don't know whether we're going to ever talk about this movie, but I remember when Warren Beatty came out with Dick Tracy, which I think did actually.

I would love to talk about Dick Tracy. It did actually flop in box office wise. But I remember the studio had this idea that they were going to like Star Wars, but they were going to make. money on high-end tie-ins. So, like, you could buy his yellow overcoat for, like, a lot of, like, but from Armani or something like that. I haven't done this research, but I just remember that being a marketing idea that I don't think worked.

But it's sort of true that Waterworld helped invent this other revenue stream that is making gobs of money 30 years later. And what 1995 film is still opening today? and still drawing an audience every day from 1995. That must say something about the premise. And I have not seen the show. I've seen some clips of the show.

And it's basically the stunts from Waterworld of boats jumping over each other and flames coming out and things like that. And okay, it looks pretty exciting. in 2026 looks pretty exciting in 1995. So I have had the pleasure of going to Universal Studios as an adult in the last 15 years, and I've seen the Waterworld show. And it's as impressive as it sounds. It's an auditorium with a giant pool in the center where people are flying off of jet skis and going off of ramps and there's explosions and all kinds of stuff.

And I want to say there might even be like a a plane of some kind. I don't think it's like actually flying. It's probably on like a gimbal arm or something. But for me, that has always been the weird thing about Waterworld in all of is. And, you know, the thing I want to compare this to, because again, this is, you know, this film gets kind of mentioned on the like worst, you know, worst films or biggest flops.

Super Mario Brothers movie. There was never a Super Mario Brothers stunt show or anything. But since that movie's come out in the 30 plus years since it's come out, it's been reappraised as well for its creativity and for doing something different and all these other kind of things that the film was doing at the time. It's just, again, with time and distance from things, we're able to understand that the industry is To expect that the industry in 1995 is always going to be this way is the reason you give the criticism that you give. Oh, it's just like Mad Max.

Well, you know what? They made more Mad Max movies. So can we really criticize this movie for being Mad Max when they made more Mad Max movies? And other things have been made in that vein. But to your point.

How many of those things have a stunt show at Universal Studios that's been running since 1995? That's insanity, Frank. And it's a great show. Like I said, I've seen it. It's exactly what you would expect.

There's like a soak zone even where you can sit where the things splash you with water and everything else. It's weird to me that this movie has this kind of weird reputation as a failure or failure Not something worth watching. But yet, like you said, it still has a presence in a place where large amounts of money are being made. And it's one of the attractions. You know how many attractions have come and gone at Universal Studios that are franchises that make more money than this one?

The thing that I always think about is the Terminator. There used to be a Terminator... theater show, 3D theater show, you would sit there and there would be all sorts of Terminator stuff happening and a guy would ride out on a motorcycle, a real person would ride out of the screen and it was supposed to be there's things happening in the auditorium. That got replaced for the Bourne Identity show. Waterworld has persisted through all of this. And what's funny to me is I would.

Not pay money to take children to the Bourne Identity show. But that's the other part about this, is that this kind of a show, I mean, the movie had violence and had, you know, uncomfortable situations, but you could take your 11-year-old to see this movie and not really feel that, you know, they were going to be permanently damaged. And the Waterworld show, yeah, I mean, of course, and let's remember the other aspect, because, you know, you've been a pioneer in bringing of the Indian cinema to United States audiences. And that's something you've really helped with for lots of people, including me, who I'm just not very familiar with Indian cinema. But let's point out Japan, Tokyo, Japan and Beijing.

I mean, this is a universal language, right? Yeah. Nobody needs captioning. Nobody needs I mean, there is narration, but but like nobody needs to have explained boats shooting each other or stunts flames. Right.

That show probably how many of the people there there was probably a huge number of international visitors who had and maybe 95 percent of those visitors had never seen the movie. That's something else. Right. Harry Potter world, you can bet everybody who goes to Harry Potter world, is there still, I'm not. The Harry Potter world still exists in multiple parks.

I'm just not, I guess I have to study this, but like Harry Potter world, you can bet 99.9% of people going to Harry Potter world, at least the younger people, maybe even the middle-aged older people have read Harry Potter, have seen, maybe the movies, right? But Waterworld, it doesn't matter. Right. Well, and you know, it's funny because, and this is the other thing we haven't really talked about, and I think it's a choice, right? And you mentioned it already, so I think it bears repeating.

Tell me another movie like this one that was filmed all on water. and it wasn't a complete nightmare to make, oh, Jaws. Like, listen to all the. Yeah, The Abyss or Master and Commander. Where's the Titanic? Every.

If you're going to film on water, just don't be a studio surprised that the budget goes up and that there's an accident and they have to build a set again or anything like that. Right. And that's the part to me, and again, as someone who, you know, for those of you at home, including myself, who... tends to sometimes forget that this is the case i have a master's in business so i understand better than some the business aspect of what we're getting at here but how could anyone sitting in a meeting in in a in a hollywood boardroom after reading the script for this movie go yeah this movie's budget's only gonna be 75 million dollars. There's No way. Anything that we do is going to balloon it past that.

To quote the professor from Fast Times at Ridgemont High, what are you all on, dope? If you've seen Jaws, or if you've heard about Jaws, which is the famous story about shooting things on water, why would you think that this film would be made in a way where it's like, nothing bad can happen with us literally filming in open water? This was not filmed on the Universal giant backlot pool that they have, which you go to Universal Studios Hollywood and you go on the backlot tour, you can see what I'm talking about. It is a pond in front of a giant blue screen. And then they just put whatever on the blue screen in the background, but they have enough distance from it where you can kind of convince the audience it's a big area.

The movie that comes to mind that they did that in, if you've seen Van Helsing, which is a personal favorite of mine, At the end of the movie, the Frankenstein character goes away on a boat. It was filmed on that set. You can't film this on a set. So you have to film this in open water. How in God's name did no one at the studio think there might be an overage of the budget?

For me, Waterworld, I think, is a really good test case for what the studio's expectations were not matching what the script laid out clearly. Because... Again, like we've. Talked about so many times on this show, like I've talked about on my show, this is not a, I turned in my paper, I'm the one who wrote it, the grade is therefore my own. Making a movie is like the world's worst group project you've ever worked on.

Because guess what? If one person screws the pooch, yeah, I'll get blamed for the most part. Some people can avoid it. Some people's careers can evade being blackballed from the industry. Kevin Costner obviously didn't take too much of a hit.

Kevin Reynolds, the director, didn't take too much of a hit. But to go back to the Josh Trank of it all, Josh Trank hasn't worked in Hollywood since that Fantastic Four movie came out. Why? Because he had the audacity to say, this movie is not representative of the movie I shot. It's not very good.

And the studio goes, now, see, we can do that. We can disavow a movie ahead of time. But you, if you're the one who made it, you better play ball until the movie comes out. Maybe once the movie's out, you can tell us how you feel. We now live in a society of movie goers and movie watchers who are so much more well-informed about the films that are coming out, about the information coming off the set.

Look, you know this, Dr. Perlmutter, as well as I do. 1995, what choices did you have? Entertainment Weekly? Starlog?

Those are publications that have a vested interest in being allowed to come back on set to talk about the movies. So they're not going to just heave-ho the movie completely online. until the movie comes out. And then that's what some of them did. Owen Gleiberman actually had a relatively high review for this movie. He gave it a B.

But so much of the initial kind of opening salvos of any review of this movie is the toxic buzz surrounding this movie or the initial bad press of this movie. Why does any of that factor into the success of the movie? You know, many movies have had bad things happen on them that nobody knows about. A lot. Like the birds.

You were talking about things that people should not be doing on set. Alfred Hitchcock falls into that mold over and over and over again. The way he treated his actors was deplorable and nobody would treat their actors like that anymore. I mean, we've made this transition, right, where the Hollywood press for decades and decades suppressed terrible things, which good journalists don't. should have reported, including the mistreatment of, say, actresses and so on, like was just Nobody reported it because they were in bed with the studios. Right.

You report this, you don't get access. That's how that works. Now you almost see what's left of the Hollywood press and you see others as more as their provocateurs. They want to have a story besides the movie, right? It's boring just to have a story about a movie coming out and doing well.

That only gets you to what fun is that? Right. But trouble on the set, and then fighting, and then Star says this thing which upsets this group, and YouTubers say this, that gets you 50 bylines and a bigger audience. So it really is interesting. Waterworld, for this film that's largely forgotten, embodies these major trends.

The soundstage show. which is still around and still making money and remarkably for a movie that supposedly was a, was a flop. The, the rise of the sort of backstage controversy, you know, the public, I, I, this is not a quote from me. I remember, I don't know who said it, but somebody said long ago, I think I was like a teenager and somebody said the publicity surrounding this movie was bigger than the movie. And right. Movies like Cleopatra that there was so much discussion with, uh, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, about them having an affair and everything, that the international press created more buzz about the actors than about the movie.

The movie benefited, I think. Supposedly, it's the most expensive movie ever made, if you counted everything, and so it didn't make its money back because of that reason, but But the buzz helped. But now we have this almost just cloud of people, one reason or another, sometimes for good reason. I've always said that, hey, if the studio has the right to spend money to convince us to watch a movie, then some independent YouTuber has the right to say, hey, I don't like these trailers or teasers. I don't like this actor.

I don't like this director. I don't like what the star is saying in an interview. They have the right to say that. But that is a phenomenon if we're doing required viewing. Waterworld was an important lesson in the creation of movies in the first place.

And, you know, you just mentioned Cleopatra. So I think that there's another inroad to mention a couple other things. Same year as this. Same year as this. Cutthroat Island.

Cutthroat Island. Another movie that is like, you know, widely reviled and it was dead to speak. OK, you know, I think the way you would look at Cutthroat Island is Cutthroat Island is what many people assume this movie was in terms of the way it was received and came out. Cutthroat Island is nowhere near as successful a movie as this one. But.

It had that same thing where it was disavowed by the studio ahead of time. Karelko like just filed for bankruptcy before the film even came out, which is, again, like complete insanity. And then to look at more contemporary things, Fantastic Four, the 2015 film, the Josh Trank one, like I mentioned, he disavowed it ahead of time. The Justice League film from 2017. that had all of that hullabaloo about Zack Snyder leaving and Joss Whedon coming on and all the wild stuff. Solo, where the two directors, Lord and Miller, got fired halfway through the production and they had to bring Ron Howard in to take over.

I think of things like Sonic the Hedgehog from 2019 where the backlash from the community was Sonic looks horrifying you gotta change him and the studio did but what the funny thing is like all of these are movies that are levels of success or failure based on the things ahead of time We've already mentioned Jaws. Jaws, for all intents and purposes, was made out to be a failure ahead of time because it had trouble on the set. Right. Trouble on the set. Overscheduled.

The shark wasn't working. They had to redo the shark. I mean, the water plus trouble on the set. You could say the same things. Absolutely.

That's very, very interesting. And also Apocalypse Now, another movie that if you go back and read the press about it at the time, it was Brando's fat and he's showing up fat and he's not prepared. Martin Sheen had a heart attack on set. There was no ending. going into the film. I think the nickname for the film was Apocalypse When at one point.

Like, when is this movie coming out? And I want to mention this because this is genuinely the one that makes me laugh the most because again, it's a direct comparative to Waterworld. Titanic. Titanic was $ 200 million worth Over budget. $ 200 million over budget. $ 200 million over budget. It is, to me, unconscionable that the studio system requires the entertainment media to help dictate success or failure. when the film should be doing that alone.

Because James Cameron, for all of the avatar of it all and all the other things that he's done since Titanic, they were treating him like the director of Heaven's Gate, Michael Cimino, before Titanic came out. They were like, this movie is going to sink the studio. This movie is going to be a massive financial loss and all these things. None of that happened. So Waterworld, in a lot of ways, is almost a bad and good example of sticking your finger on the scale for seemingly no reason.

Maybe I don't know where they do. They want things to fail. That's what I can't figure out, because like you said, a failure gives you 50 bylines. The success gives you 20. Well, I think just to wrap up from my end that my conclusion walking out of the movie house in 1995 was that was worth five bucks.

That was fun. If I had been. Doing a podcast in 1995, I guess it would have to be on internet radio or something. Right. I would have talked about like, oh, there were some cringe moments and Dennis Hopper.

I just didn't think that he worked. And there were some plot lines which I felt just didn't make sense or were dropped. I'd say those things. We're not saying any film is necessarily critic proof from 360 criticism. But part of what we're trying to do here in required viewing is make the case that films should be judged at the end of the day within what they're trying to set out to accomplish.

So like I've used the. Example before, it's going to take a lot for you to convince me. And you've tried. You've tried, Chris, to say, let's do Minecraft. And I have turned you down time after time after time.

At the end of every episode, I asked Dr. Perlmutter, can we do Minecraft now? And he's just like, nope, not today. There's some films where I just have a block because I'm going like, wow, I am so outside the demographic. Maybe it would be so painful to watch that film.

But just from a distance, a wildly successful film, and I don't just mean money, for a specific target demographic. And Waterworld was a good example of a general film, like a family film. You could take your grandkids to it. You could, grandpa and grandma could go to it and they would have a fun X number of hours. And the proof is that you can relive the best parts of Waterworld in Beijing today.

And I think, you know, as you've given kind of your closing thoughts, I would say that twofold for me, a couple, or threefold, several things. I am still no less of a fan of Kevin Costner than I was when I started watching Waterworld. Kevin Costner, for me, is the kind of actor who... In the 90s, he had successes and failures, but he was always doing exactly what was being asked of him as an actor, which I think for this film is important because this film needed someone like him to be involved to get it made, to have certain things happen. It's been communicated in several publications that Kevin Costner had a huge hand in certain creative decisions in the film.

What those creative decisions are, I do not know. And without speaking to anyone involved in the film, I may not know. But I can tell you that this is the only Kevin Costner film of his I've seen that I like him in. Because if you're the kind of actor whose need is to be stoic and hands-off, that's what we're going for here. And why this kind of movie with that kind of actor and this kind of setup was not successful. is strange.

To me because these kinds of movies are not unpopular broadly. They're very pop. And like you said, they're so popular to the fact that we have a Waterworld stage show that's still going on in four different places across the world. when this film has been more or less said like, well, this film's not good. Nobody cares. And we should never have anything to do with this movie.

To think about a press in being involved in the success or failure of a movie is really, I mean, again, we kind of think about it now because it makes so much sense now because we're so used to the exposure of the press being more or less constant with variety and entertainment weekly and, you know, all these movie websites and movie news and TikTok and YouTube and all these places you can go get your movie news. I am very much the kind of person in a lot of ways about most things, film included. I feel like if you meet the film where it's asking you to meet it, then you can make a decision as to whether or not the film is successful. If you go and see a James Bond film And your takeaway at the end is, well, there was too much killing in that movie for me.

Well, it was a James Bond film. What did you expect? And in this film, it's that same thing. It is a film about people on the high seas shooting at each other in makeshift boats. I don't know why it needed to be any more than that.

I don't know why anyone wanted it to be any more than that. If the expectation was that people were going to show up for Citizen Kane and instead they got Citizen Gills or whatever pun we want to go with, that's fine. But like you already said, when it comes to looking at something in a holistic 360 direction, take the media side out of this and not knowing all these budgetary issues and all the... A budgetary issue affects us as the audience zero, literally zero. That is just a data point for me or you or anyone to know.

It doesn't affect my ability to enjoy the film at all. And that I think is what's so important because as film criticism and analysis has gone on, since the 90s, like with what you and I are doing here. It's more important to look at everything as opposed to, well, I didn't like this movie, and therefore, no, no, it's my feelings towards the movie don't matter at all. The film's success is based purely on whether or not it succeeds at doing what it's trying to do. And this film is trying to be an entertaining film about people on the high seas shooting at each other in boats.

It kind of makes me sad you don't like Dennis Hopper in this movie, Dr. Perlmutter. I get it. I love Dennis Hopper in this movie, but Dennis Hopper is, I think, hilariously miscast in this movie only because. I.

Think that's what I'm saying is that Dennis Hopper... One negative criticism of the film, if we wanted to do a second episode just on what's wrong with the movie, because I hope we haven't made this case that this is one of the great masterpieces of the legitimate cinema. Cinema with a capital C, you mean? There's three or four. Movies going on at the same time, right?

I think there were some issues with the script. Joss Whedon was brought on, but not credited. And you sort of wonder what it would have been if he'd just written a script from the beginning. And, you know, the more screenwriters, not the better, as you've pointed out. Too many cooks in the kitchen.

Yeah. But Dennis Hopper was terrific in some other movie. I'm not sure what it was. And there were just, there's some other things there, but, but again, it's interesting that you, the show that you watched at, at Universal Studios was 20 minutes, right? That's what I understand the show.

Yeah. Yeah. It's about 20, 25 minutes. Yeah. That, that seating is between, it's about 2,500 or yeah.

And what's it, was it pretty full? Yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

And, and, So people are not going on the other rides or attractions. They, five-year-olds and 70-year-olds, it was not all 70-year-olds who watched the movie, right? No. I've seen these pictures of the crowds, and you're obviously seeing tourists from... Africa and China and all over the world coming to see this film that they'd never heard, but they've heard about the show.

And so just, we want to emphasize that success, sometimes it takes a long time to measure success. This is the most, one of the most successful films in the world if it's just measured by that, this one metric. And I couldn't find any stats on like how profitable it is but like they wouldn't be doing it if they would have closed it it wasn't bringing in the bucks. They would have found something else to replace it with because universal studios has replaced so many other rides with so many other things the thing i think about is the king kong experience at universal studios florida was replaced with Revenge of the Mummy based on the 1999 Mummy film again and that still sticks around too so it's it's weird to me that success sometimes is measured we consider a film a success or failure based on what happens the weekend it came out and nothing else. this film has had an extremely long tail to it, which for me, as someone who sits here and talks about a lot of film, that means it's a success in a different way.

For me, this is akin to, and this is my kind of closing statement for me to make a successful movie is not really that hard successful movies come out all the time it's not really that hard to make a bad movie either bad movies come out all the time but you know what is hard to do make a film that lasts in the public mind or the pop culture zeitgeist for more than five minutes and when I think about five films that do that there are a couple kinds of film john favreau making elf into a literal contemporary christmas classic tell me another one There aren't a whole lot. It's so much harder to make a contemporary Christmas classic or a film that shows up in a Universal Studios park than anything else.

There are so many successful films out there that exist. You know, I think of The Green Book or the Catherine Bigelow film where it's the people diffusing the bombs in Iraq. Those films won Academy Awards. They're technically successful. Who's talking about.

Either of those films in 2026? Nobody. But yet, you go to Universal Studios, you pay your $ 80 or whatever the hell it is for a ticket, and you go into that park, you can watch a Waterworld show. In 2026! What are we doing here?

If we're gonna consider this movie a failure, there are, you know, there are movies that made more money in the 90s that I would consider failures than the movie that, you know, kind of broke even eventually. But it has four different attractions at four different parks that people can still engage. And that's why we that's was the reason for us doing required viewing, because it is important to understand as someone who watches film and enjoys film and wants to take film somewhat seriously, that Success is not a single metric item. It's a thing that can be measured from multiple facets. And yeah, on the last episode, we talked about Sideways, a movie that was successful, won Oscars and all kinds.

This film didn't win an Oscar for anything. This film, for I think most people, has more or less been forgotten. But yet if you go somewhere... and spend your money there, you can see this film represented in a way that you can't go see sideways represented at Universal Studios or anything like that. And that's a success. And again, not to mention creating a world that feels unique, weird, and lived in.

Creating an idea that I think, you know, there was talk 10 years ago about a water world TV show. I would totally be game for that. You could do a lot of weird stuff with this. I don't understand remaking things that are successful. I am more of the mind, take something that was slightly successful, do something else with it.

I don't think this is the last we've heard of Waterworld, frankly. If they were talking about it in the last 10 years, there might be more coming down the pipeline eventually. but Waterworld is not a film that's fallen as far out of the public consciousness as one might think, based only upon the fact that there are long legs elsewhere that the film can still, I think, be part of the conversation in some even minor way. Because you know what the other thing is, and neither one of us mentioned this, you think if people go watch Waterworld at Universal Studios, they're not going home and maybe watching the movie as well? Well, I think, based upon this podcast, I predict that Apple... Or Prime is going to give the go-ahead to the series.

I wouldn't be surprised, would you? We are willing to serve as consultant producers to shape the future of the Waterworld series, which we have resurrected. But something else, too, like what you said, if you count all the people who've been at that show, and there are multiple shows every day, right? They don't just show it once. Yeah, it's shown like every half hour or something.

There are likely hundreds of thousands of people that maybe more people have watched the show. the live show than the movie. So you could argue there is a built-in audience as young as five years old. Right. They're like, oh, okay, I'd watch a Waterworld series. It's not crazy, just like the original premise.

But anyway, thank you, Chris. This is a great example of a film. It's not in the Pantheon. No critic circle has elevated it, but it had its successes and should be recognized as such. I think it's in a pantheon.

It's just not in the pantheon. And by the way, for anyone who's interested, who doesn't want to go look it up, the director whose name was attached to the TV show was Dan Trachtenberg, who made admittedly the best Predator film that's come out since the original Predator with Predator Badlands. So Dan Trachtenberg, if you want to make a Waterworld TV show, by all means make it because it'll probably be pretty good. So until you hear Dr. Perlmutter and I talking about not Waterworld and hopefully not another Kevin Costner movie, you can find the two of us over at weirdingwaymedia.com where this show can be found on the CultureCast subfeed.

Required viewing is a show that Dr. Perlmutter and I do once a week every Thursday. as a little addition to the CultureCast where we talk about film from a 360 perspective, which is what you just heard. So like, rate, and review this show and that show over at iTunes or Spotify. If you want to kick a couple dollars my way, that goes into the till to help produce the show. That's at patreon.com slash culturecast.

If you don't, like and rate the show on iTunes, then Spotify in that order because it helps us out the most that way. And as always, we will catch you on the next episode. Thank you.