Why Waterworld Will Work As A TV Series

Why Waterworld Will Work As A TV Series

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1995’s Waterworld is set to continue as a TV series, and the world established by the post-apocalyptic sci-fi actioner can thrive in this format.

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Why Waterworld Will Work As A TV Series

1995’s Waterworld has a televised continuation in the works, and it’s the best way to pick up where the movie left off. The announcement of the Waterworld TV series came right as the 1995 film was celebrating its 26th anniversary, with details that the show will reportedly take place 20 years after the film. It’s easy to forget now, but the Waterworld movie being realized at all was a torturous process, to say the least.

The Kevin Costner-led post-apocalyptic sci-fi adventure cost $175 million and was the most expensive movie ever made at that point. The film also has a brutally difficult production that grappled with hurricanes, sinking sets, and creative disagreements, contributing to its budget overruns, earning it the nicknames “Fishtar” and “Kevin’s Gate” after famed flops Ishtar and Heaven’s Gate. Though it would spawn the Waterworld: A Live Sea War Spectacular stunt show at various Universal Studios theme parks around the world, still running to this day, Waterworld became synonymous with Murphy’s Law wreaking havoc on an ambitious film production.

It might seem counterintuitive for Universal to dredge up a box office bomb on the level of Dolittle for an episodic revival, much less decades after it was first released. Yet, on the contrary, Waterworld is now exactly the kind of hybernating property that could be dusted off and rediscovered by viewers. Moreover, Waterworld specifically continuing as a TV series has a number of advantages for its second shot, including some it wouldn’t have had back in the 90s.

Waterworld Bombed In 1995 But Has Seen A Reappraisal Since

Why Waterworld Will Work As A TV Series

In 2021, a $175 million budget might be sizeable but relatively manageable if it’s being poured into the right tentpole. Back in 1995, Waterworld appeared to be the epitome of financial recklessness when it arrived in theaters with that same price tag attached and months of negative buzz surrounding its infamously troubled production–and that didn’t even include its marketing budget and any production budget overages. Pulling in $263 million worldwide, Waterworld seemed destined to be forever remembered as one of the biggest box office bombs in history rather than Mad Max on the high seas, but time has been kind to the maligned summer blockbuster that wasn’t.

Through home video revenue and cable rights sales, Waterworld eventually turned a profit, and its reputation has noticeably warmed over the years. The “Ulysses Cut” has partly been responsible for that, giving more development to The Mariner and his relationship with Helen and Enola and taking a deeper dive into humanity’s adaptation to the global flood. As Waterworld has slowly but surely gained more love in the time since its tempestuous debut, it’s not that surprising that Hollywood has decided to take another look at it as a cult movie with revival potential. In that respect, TV seems the most surefire bet for Waterworld’s belated second life.

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Waterworld’s Premise Lends Itself To A Series Format

Why Waterworld Will Work As A TV Series

In the 90s, something like Waterworld might have only seemed feasible as a big-budget movie. However, the industry has changed a lot since 1995, and with Netflix TV shows leading the advent of streaming, television, in particular, has evolved the most. Even with multiple billion-dollar hits in a single year, general theater attendance was on the decline well before COVID-19 took its toll. At the same time, the production values and storytelling format of TV shows have expanded and improved considerably.

AMC’s The Walking Dead has shown that a post-apocalyptic series based on a relatively niche source material can become a major, long-running franchise with multiple spinoffs on the small screen. Additionally, serialized storytelling has also come to be a major power player in entertainment, as seen in shows like Cobra Kai becoming a cultural phenomenon through Netflix. As far as large scale TV productions, one need only look at the rise of HBO’s Game of Thrones (its intensely divisive final season notwithstanding) to see that an epic scope and a fully realized world far different from our own are now well within the capabilities of the small screen.

While Waterworld had big action scenes and a real sense of adventure as a movie, the world it takes place in could really benefit from the episodic treatment and an ensemble of characters that viewers follow in their own personal stories. The story is a relatively simple one, and little explanation would be needed to tie the series back to the events of the 1995 film. It’s a more straightforward, linear connection than a series like Loki to set up the next story with characters new and old. What also makes Waterworld so tailor-made for what contemporary television can do goes back to the groundwork the movie already laid regarding world-building.

There’s A Lot Of World Building That Can Be Done With Waterworld

The term “world-building” is more thrown around than ever these days, and it’s something that Waterworld offers up naturally. The movie has long since gotten the basics set in motion: the polar ice caps have melted and covered the Earth in water; mankind now survives on floating communities known as atolls. Smokers, led by the Deacon, Waterworld’s equivalent of Captain Barbossa, are the villainous scavengers terrorizing the surviving humans. And a map once thought to be a myth leads to the discovery of Dryland at the end of the film. With the series set to begin 20 years after the end of the movie, there’s a treasure trove possibilities the show can explore, not the least of which is the inevitable colonization of Dryland as surviving humans learn of its discovery, or The Mariner’s continued adventures after departing Dryland for his true home on the ocean. How much the world has changed since Dryland’s discovery could easily set up the introduction of new characters with arcs running parallel to each other and a fully fresh reintroduction to life in Waterworld itself.

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The show could also build on elements from the 1997 comic book mini-series Waterworld: Children of Leviathan. Picking up after the film’s ending, the comic book alluded to the Mariner’s gills being the result of genetic experimentation rather than the mutant hybrid of man and fish he was believed to be and introduced the new villain, Leviathan, as an associate of the Deacon and the Smokers. With other additions to the Waterworld mythos, Children of Leviathan would give even more source material for the series to draw upon.

The aforementioned discovery of Dryland also gives the Waterworld series one benefit that the movie almost completely lacked, which is, of course, the presence of solid land as a setting. Waterworld’s production troubles would be easy to avoid with that on the show’s side and production being more reliant on tanks, smaller bodies of open water, and modern greenscreen work to sidestep the Jaws-level production nightmare that was Waterworld’s shoot. Part of the fun of Waterworld was also in seeing the makeshift floating cities and how the surviving humans repurposed old tools to use in new ways. What would a city on Dryland built from raw materials gathered over hundreds of years from mankind’s long forgotten, land-dwelling ancestors look like? Waterworld: The Series has questions like that as its very starting point.

As Waterworld has moved from the most cataclysmic bomb of the 90s to the enduring cult sci-fi adventure movie it’s since become, a TV revival doesn’t look like a bad idea. With the continuation going the televised route, the episodic format and potential for world expansion and development it affords make it a better option than a simple big-screen Waterworld 2. If the show avoids the circumstances that made the movie such a bitter challenge to complete, Waterworld could finally have a shot at making it big and connecting with viewers without having to take the scenic route.

Link Source : https://screenrant.com/waterworld-tv-series-work-format-story-why/

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