Waterworld (1995): Ruin Your Friendship For Only £175m

Ben and Rob set sail for Waterworld, Kevin Reynolds' 1995 post-apocalyptic epic that turned a five-million-dollar B-movie idea into the most expensive film ever made at the time, and one of Hollywood's most infamous cautionary tales. Directed by Reynolds and starring Kevin Costner, Jeanne Tripplehorn, Tina Majorino and Dennis Hopper, the film follows a mutant drifter across a flooded Earth while, behind the scenes, an unfinished script, a gigantic floating city and two old friends with very different ideas of what movie they were making pushed the production towards complete industrial madness.

How did Roger Corman rejecting a waterlogged Mad Max knock-off for being too expensive lead, somehow, to a $175 million studio blockbuster? Why did Kevin Costner and Kevin Reynolds agree to work together again after Robin Hood had already wrecked their friendship, and how did the exact same argument over creative control come back to destroy them twice? What happens when you decide the best way to suggest a floating city is to actually build one, chain it to the seabed and employ Lockheed Martin to help keep the bastard afloat? And after months of headlines branding it “Fishtar” and “Kevin’s Gate” before audiences had even seen it, was Waterworld really the catastrophic flop everyone remembers, or did the story of the disaster become bigger than the film itself?

And finally… what does it really mean?!

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