Welcome to For Your Amusement, a theme park podcast that aims to exhaustively evaluate the world's most popular theme park attractions to determine if they are world class.

I'm Ryan Bergara.

And I'm Baran Marin.

And for this episode's featured attraction, we kick back on a floating piece of sheet

metal to discuss Waterworld, a live sea war spectacular at Universal Studios Hollywood, as well

as Universal Studios Japan and Singapore.

You do have quite an affinity for this particular show. The show. The show.

Not the film. In fact, I have a little deacon action figure here that my pal Shane Medea got me when he was out and about. He saw it at a shop immediately thought of me just because my affinity for this show is so well known, which for you folks that are listening,

you're not treated to the beautiful side of my deacon action figure, nor are you treated to the

sight of me in full cosplay as an atoller. I got the whole shebang on. I got the gloves on. I'm

going to go home like this. It's going to be great. Without further ado, before I start waxing

poetic about this, why don't we get into some history?

All right, so the conception of this show is actually rather similar to another attraction we've discussed at length, that being Jurassic World, in which the attraction was being developed prior to the release of the actual film. They greenlit a stunt show to take

over the Miami Vice stunt show at Universal Studios Hollywood. And they started development on this

a year before the film was released. But unlike Jurassic Park, Waterworld essentially bombed.

It was one of the most famous box office bombs of all time. It had a

ballooned budget that went way over. It was the highest of its time, I think at 175 million. Oh my God.

Easily over 200 million after you count, you know, marketing costs. So by the time theaters took

their cut of the film, that's a big loss.

I think it's a loss that some estimate to be around $100 million. That is bananas. That's a pretty

insane, especially because they were like, we're so sure this thing's going to be a hit. We're going to

make an action-themed stunt show off of it because people love waterworld. They get to hang out with all their pals. They get to hang out with the deacon, the mariner. And then most audiences walked into this show and we're like, who are these guys? Because no one went to go see the movie. You seen the movie Waterworld? No? Don't worry, nobody has seen the World Waterworld.

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