Work on the Waterworld attraction began before the movie ever came out.
The show came into being as a replacement for the Miami Vice Action Spectacular, which had been in place since 1989. "I've been many times - I've brought my family, I love it," Rader said. It won a Thea (Themed Entertainment Association) Award after it first launched, and went on to win the Thea Classic Award in 2017 for being an attraction that's withstood the test of time. The show has endured, with next year marking the 25th anniversary of both the attraction and the film. "Probably for a lot of theme park fans, when you say 'Waterworld,' we're all thinking of the Universal show moreso than the movie at this point." "It's a really odd situation where I think the attraction is far more popular than the movie, in most ways," Shawn Marshall of theme park site Parks And Cons said.
#Waterworld movie stills pro
(I also like pro wrestling, so watching people fake fighting and jumping off of high places at this thing might be kind of close?) I get chills during the opening narration, and love coming back to see it from different angles at different times of day. Tens of millions have seen that show over the years at a Universal park - Rader said he thought it might even be hundreds of millions, with up to 10 shows a day all year long. That's because the Waterworld show at Universal Studios Hollywood - aka Waterworld: A Live Sea War Spectacular - has run since 1995, and 2,500 people can fit into the show's bleachers.
And yes, Waterworld rules as hard as that description makes it sound."Even though there was all this negative press at the time," Rader said, "it might be one of the most profitable titles in the Universal library." A stoic, reluctant hero (think Max Rockatansky on water), he rescues a woman and a small girl, who, as it turns out, are the key to finding the mythical "Dryland." Their journey is complicated, however, when they run afoul of Dennis Hopper’s Deacon, a post-apocalyptic warlord, and his gang of "smokers," who live on an old oil tanker but who would also prefer to live on dry land. Kevin Costner plays a mutant flipper-man who sails around on his post-apocalyptic catamaran, drinking his own pee, and battling sea monsters. Just in case you don’t remember, Waterworld takes place in a future where the polar ice caps have melted, causing the oceans to rise, and forcing everyone to live on boats, or makeshift floating shantytowns. Granted, that is still an ass-load of cash, but in today’s blockbuster-minded landscape, that’s barely considered outlandish at all (these days Waterworld is the 63rd most expensive movie ever produced). With massive, elaborate sets-shooting in open water is tricky and expensive-the film kept getting deeper and deeper into cost overruns, until the original $100 million budget ballooned to a bloated $175 million, which was, at the time, a record. Set in a world where there is no land, every last scene takes place on the high seas. To be fair, the bulk of the fuss wasn’t primarily about the movie itself, it was about the out of control budget. The film has held up remarkable well over the years, and while I don’t know if it has quite achieved full-fledged cult status, the hard stance originally taken against the movie has definitely softened over time. While things like plot, story, and characterization were picked apart by critics, many still praised the soaring action, comparing it to George Miller’s Mad Max films, except, you know, on water. Reviews of Waterworld were mixed upon its initial theatrical release. The movie with all its imperfections was a joy for me…a joy to look back upon and to have participated in. The thing I know is that I never had to stand taller for a movie when most were going the other way. It could have had a better, more obvious outcome. I know that people might think of Waterworld as a low point for me. He decided maybe he gave it a bum rap the first time around and reached out to Costner for his take. Jeff Wells at Hollywood Elsewhere is one who revisited Waterworld after a long time. The film just turned 20 at the end of last month (it was released on July 28, 1995), and there have been some people looking back on it to mark the occasion.