Waterworld/Trivia

• Box Office Bomb: Subverted. It is often cited as one of the most notorious box office failures in movie history, but that's not doing the research properly: it did flop in the US, but then it went to the foreign market and performed very well there, easily making back its budget in gross revenue. Not to mention home video sales/rentals.
• Executive Meddling:
  • Unusually, it was actually Costner editing with rumors of him firing Reynolds.
  • Relatedly, script doctor Joss Whedon says his job was basically taking notes from Costner.
• Hey, It's That Guy!:
  • Jack Black as the smoker airplane pilot.
  • Enola went on to play Deb in Napoleon Dynamite.
• Hey, It's That Voice!:
  • For some who watched the Japanese dub, Ikue Ohtani, who does the voice for Enola is known for providing the voice for Pikachu years before Pokémon.
  • Trailer voiceover legend Hal Douglas narrates the opening.
• Troubled Production: The ballooning of the budget ($100 million to $175 million) is the lesser part of it. The Executive Meddling made it even worse. The hurricane trashing the main set didn't help either.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The film originated as a writer's pitch to notoriously low-budget producer Roger Corman. Corman turned it down saying that it would cost them $5 million.
  • The version that Universal ended up buying was basically a kiddie flick -- Enola was the main character alongside two of Helen's own kids, the Mariner was a human and largely a supporting character, while the early version of the Deacon can only be described as being how you'd expect the Adam West Batman series to characterize him. Needless to say, the subsequent drafts took the film in a very different direction.
  • Universal Pictures wanted Robert Zemeckis ^[1] to direct. Kevin Costner insisted on having Kevin Reynolds.
  • Also: The film originally had a different composer, Mark Isham, but his soundtrack was thrown out and replaced with a new score by James Newton Howard. Both scores present drastically different tones to the material, with the latter being more adventurous and upbeat sounding.
  • The entire slaver faction was written out when the set was destroyed.

1. ↑ Yes, that Robert Zemeckis.