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Movie Known as a Notorious Box Office Bomb Might Become a TV Series

Nov 28, 2012  •  Post A Comment

It’s known as one of Hollywood’s biggest box office bombs and isn’t an obvious choice to make into a television series, but Syfy is viewing it as an "underexploited piece of intellectual property," reports Jeff Bercovici at Forbes.com.

That property is "Waterworld," the 1995 Kevin Costner film that reportedly cost $235 million, making it the most expensive movie ever at the time, the story notes. That record was later overtaken by "Titanic," a huge worldwide hit, while "Waterworld" only escaped losing money through home video sales.

Every time the network airs "Waterworld," it draws a healthy viewership, with 400,000 people tuning in for the most recent broadcast, the piece notes.

A series based on the movie is something that has been "talked about endlessly" and remains a possibility, according to Dave Howe, the president of Syfy.

3 Comments

  1. Actually, Waterworld was a very profitable film for Universal. It made a great deal of money overseas, and was the basis of a live attraction at Universal City Studios tours for many years.

  2. Waterworld is still one of my favorite movies. As I recall, critics lambasted this movie to no end before it was released and the general public listened and do not go to this movie. It only made $88 million in the US total and $264 million worldwide. In the end, this was just an action packed fun movie while I think the critics were expecting another Dances With Wolves.
    Apparently, a lot of people must agree based on video sales and SyFy viewership.
    I like The Postman as well for that matter, another huge Kevin Costner bomb which only made $17.4 million.
    Each to his own, I guess.

  3. The only problem is that SyFy, in general, has not been recently known for making the best products in recent years. They passed on Battlestar Galactica Blood and Chrome as a series which seemed like a likely success story. Over the past few years, SyFy has consistently moved away from the types of shows that made them well known and instead replaced Sci-Fi with reality shows and wrestling. I realize these shows may be cheaper to produce but your original core audience isn’t watching too much anymore. Also, those SyFy Saturday night movies are usually just lame. I used to watch the Stargates and Battlestar Galactica but now I am down to the few Warehouse 13’s and Haven (which isn’t great). Oh, well. I would certainly give a Waterworld TV series a look though.

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