MCA is also seeking brownie-points especially as Steven Spielberg has struck up on his own since he has given Universal the two
MCA is also seeking brownie-points, especially as Steven Spielberg has struck up on his own; since he has given Universal the two biggest grossers in movie history - ET and Jurassic Park - the company is hoping he will consent to the new alliance.To get back that $100m Waterworld needs to take as much as the two Spielberg films. The script went through endless re-writes - a situation endemic to the megabuck picture, said Variety.Reynold's admitted that it wasn't Four Weddings and Funeral with a budget of $5m: he hopes to do something like that "where every change does not require three hours of meetings and thousands and thousands of dollars." He was still editing two weeks ago, when the first cut weighed in at 2hrs 34mins. Tom Pollick, chairman of MCA, which owns Universal, said: "It's everything we hoped it would be." But another source reported, "It knocked their socks off, but there's a lot of work to be done."It is due to open in America on 28 July, but for the present it is a pawn for Seagrams, the liquor manufacturer, in its negotiations to buy MCA from Matsushita. The problems of filming on water - changing light and currents, hardware sinking or floating away, the danger to the crew - don't seem to have been considered. What Universal got was Reynolds, director of three flops plus Robin Hood.The original budget seems to have been $65m - already more than twice as much as most A-features - on a 96-day schedule, beginning off Hawaii in June last year The set alone cost $40m.
As director Universal favoured Robert Zemekis, who - especially with the Back to the Future films - had established himself as an expert on expensive films with myriad special effects. It cost $24m and returned a mere $330,000 when Warners released it last September.As they did so, Costner was in the midst of filming Waterworld, a sort of Mad Max with gills in which he and some followers are trying to survive after the polar ice caps have melted. On Robin Hood, Costner had shot several second-unit scenes without reference to Reynolds, who "was essentially told to distance himself" according to his director of photography, Douglas Milsome, "but Costner was in the cutting room, putting more close-ups of himself in, which Reynolds had left out."The friendship between the two Kevins seemed over, but there was a rapprochement when Costner invested in Rapa Nui, a tale set on Easter Island, which also had a financial input from Warner Bros, who had Costner under an "exclusive" contract. "They're just designed to get you in and get you out."Dances With Wolves and JFK were both long, but at least they could boast strong subject-matter: the notices, however, seemed to have told Costner he was the ideal interpreter of America's past - and among the seven Oscars for Wolves, those for best picture and best director would have gone to anyone's head.So the situation of Robin Hood was repeated on two of Costner's next three films.
"I'm sick of movies that are just two hours long," Costner said. Others might say it was "magical" and much more fun that this ill conceived, overly violent and lengthy version. Castle Rock offered the direction of theirs to Kevin Reynolds who had given Costner his first break in his own first professional film, Fandango (1985). Anyone seeing that might think twice about assigning an expensive project to a relatively untried talent, and Reynolds subsequently made The Beast (1988) which was equally lumbering and predictable; it was also a flop, but at least it looked good.The same could not be said of Robin Hood: Costner did not want it to look like the Errol Flynn Robin, which he described as "silly". Not only do both concern the same historical event, but Costner turned down the first in order to do the second.His tribulations may have started when three separate companies invited him to play the title-role in the new versions of the Robin Hood story. Top, unsurprisingly, is Tom Hanks, but at an ironic 18th place is Kurt Russell, partly because of Tombstone, which took $30m more than Wyatt Earp. Wyatt Earp (June 1994) took $25m in the US on an estimated budget of $60m.An analysis of the US grosses of the last three movies of 31 stars in the current issue of Empire places Costner last at No 31.