Eventually Reynolds quit the film and wouldn’t reconcile with Costner for decades. Universal Pictures started the movie with an authorized budget of $100 million. By the time it was complete, Waterworld cost a reported $175 million, making it the most expensive film of all time up to that point. (Titanic was still a few years off.)
Reviews were not as damning as you may have expected for such a notorious production. Roger Ebert liked it, and so did Entertainment Weekly, even if its status as a wannabe Mad Max was evident to all. But the bad press surrounding it overpowered everything, to the point where the truth became a footnote. So it may surprise you to learn that Waterworld wasn’t a flop. It earned $264.2 million worldwide, making it the ninth-highest-grossing movie of 1995 (although its exorbitant budget did mean it stayed in the red in cinemas.) Conversely, its VHS and LaserDisc releases eventually did make the film profitable.
The film has also left behind a surprising cultural footprint thanks to the four Waterworld-related attractions at Universal Studios theme parks around the globe. The stunt spectacular is still playing to eager crowds every day in Hollywood, which isn’t too shabby for a film that we’re told nobody saw or liked.
But what of the film itself? Is Waterworld all that bad? Well, no. It’s not necessarily a hidden gem but it is a highly watchable sci-fi action movie full of practical sets and stunts that are genuinely impressive to witness.
You’d never see a movie like this in 2025, at least not with this kind of physical presence shot in a tank, rather than wall-to-wall CGI employed these days (see even George Miller’s latest Wasteland epic, Furiosa). There is something fascinatingly old-fashioned about Waterworld in its earnestness and commitment to goodness winning out over evil (represented here by a never-hammier Dennis Hopper.) It’s also unabashedly pro-environmentalist, which feels a touch radical at a time when any movie with the vaguest hint of a political message is hijacked for the so-called culture wars. This is a film about how much climate change is going to destroy us!
The biggest problem with the film is its tone. It’s often grand but largely silly in ways it doesn’t seem aware of. Costner plays the hero, a stoic loner of the sea who is also half-fish. At one point he even leaps through the air like a dolphin. The Mad Max series works because George Miller knows how to balance the sinister with the camp, but Waterworld tries so hard to make steampunk-esque goons on Kawasaki jetskis seem terrifying, and they just aren’t. Mad Max movies are also smart enough to strip away any plot complexities in favor of reaching toward the mythic, whereas Waterworld is convoluted and ends up with a strangely muddled narrative that nobody asked for.