Kevin Costner’s Most Infamous Box Office ‘Flop’ Wasn’t the Disaster People Think

Kevin Costner’s career has had some dizzying highs and some surprisingly low valleys, but we’ve never seen the legendary movie star and multiple Academy Award winner as down and about as depressed as he is right now. A recently published article by The Hollywood Reporter highlighted not only Costner’s surly behavior on the set of “Yellowstone,” but also his humiliating failure to secure financing to complete his planned four-part Western epic “Horizon: An American Saga” (the first entry failed at the box office, leaving the completed second film without a distributor) and his alleged violation of safety protocols on set when he forced a stuntwoman to perform an unscripted rape scene. It seems Costner’s difficult reputation has caught up with him now that he’s no longer a bankable movie star and is persona non grata in the wildly popular “Yellowstone” universe (which revived his career in the 2010s). The THR article paints a bleak picture, but it becomes unduly harsh and downright ahistorical when its author cites “Waterworld” as the failure that triggered Costner’s fall from commercial grace.

Here’s the problem with that statement: “Waterworld” was not a failure.

According to the THR story, when “Waterworld” hit theaters on July 28, 1995, it quickly “became one of the biggest flops since… well, ‘Heaven’s Gate.'” The reference to Michael Cimino’s disastrous Western flop is a callback to the reporting on Costner’s first film, “Dances with Wolves” — which, with its daunting three-hour runtime hours and its association with what was then considered a dead film. genre, was vilified before release as “Kevin’s Door.” Many crows were consumed when the film became a hit and Costner won the Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Director. Then, five years later, the wildly over-budgeted “Waterworld” project was derided as “Fishtar.” It was anything but.

As an entirely original post-apocalyptic science fiction film, “Waterworld” represented a huge commercial risk for Universal Pictures. Even though Costner had just stumbled as the lead in Lawrence Kasdan’s expensive Western biopic “Wyatt Earp,” he was able to survive a speed bump after his string of hits from 1987 to 1993. Consider that he was teaming up again with “Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves” director Kevin Reynolds and the studio couldn’t say no, even if the budget was $100 million.

Before principal photography, Steven Spielberg urged Costner and Reynolds not to shoot the film in open water in the Pacific Ocean. The “Jaws” director knew well the budget-blowing potential of relying on Mother Nature’s hospitality, but the filmmaking duo was determined to create a one-of-a-kind ocean epic and pushed ahead (filming in an artificial seawater enclosure off the coast of Hawaii). Thus began the nightmarish production of “Waterworld,” with film crews frequently displaced by waves, gloomy weather extending filming more than 50 days beyond schedule and a partially sinking slave colony. After all that, the film’s final budget was estimated to be around $175 million, meaning it would need to gross around $350 worldwide to break even.

“Waterworld” received largely mixed reviews from leading critics nationwide. Only Chicago Reader’s Jonathan Rosenbaum came closest to panning the film, but Newsweek’s David Ansen caused a rave. The film opened to a healthy, if unspectacular, $21 million domestically and ended up grossing $264 million worldwide. The film was clearly in the red, but it was far from a disaster on the scale of “Heaven’s Gate,” where a $44 million film only grossed $3.5 million. Other films released between Cimino’s film and “Waterworld” (e.g. Terry Gilliam’s “The Adventures of Baron Munchausen,” which grossed $8 million against a budget of $47 million) were much bigger losers.

And once “Waterworld” reached the home entertainment revenue window, it could have turned a profit.

According to an earnings comparison published by Deadline in 2013, “Waterworld” was far from a failure. Although analyst numbers are outdated in the streaming era, there was a time when “Waterworld” would have been a well-managed risk. All things considered, one might call it a disappointment for its exorbitant cost, but that has no place in conversation with jaw-dropping bombs like “The Adventures of Pluto Nash,” “Cutthroat Island” and “Inchon.”

As for the alleged damage to Costner’s career, he rebounded with Ron Shelton’s well-reviewed golf romantic comedy “Tin Cup” the following year (which, like “Waterworld,” became a dad-favorite movie years after its theatrical release), before truly falling into the box office ditch with the critical flop “The Postman” in 1997. Yet Costner got back on track in 1999 with the popular romantic drama “Message.” in a bottle,” and, after a series of poor performances (like “Thirteen Days”), he hit moviegoers again with the modest western success “Open Range” in 2003. SO the waters became rough.

Costner hasn’t starred in a box office hit in 22 years and, although he’s begged billionaires and Saudi Arabia for money, he’s nowhere near finishing the last two “Horizon: An American Saga” films. He’s facing it now, and it seems he’s the cause of much of this unhappiness. But when you write about Costner’s tumultuous career, you do a disservice to cinema history when you call “Waterworld” a fiasco.