13 Movies You Presumed Were Massive Flops (That Really Weren't)
9. Waterworld
If you look up the word "flop" in the dictionary, I'm pretty sure there's a picture of Kevin Costner p*ssing into a bottle. At the time of its release, Waterworld was the most expensive movie ever made, budgeted at $175 million and widely expected to be a mammoth success.
The movie ended up making just $264 million at the box office, resulting in a seeming $89 million profit, though with marketing costs rumoured to have sky-rocketed to $60 million, really the movie just made $29 million when it was all said and done. Due to the extensive publicity surrounding the film's underwhelming performance, it was reported that even still, the movie did not present gains for Universal after taking into account the cut that cinema chains would take from the gross.
Therefore, the movie only truly started to generate revenue on home video. Still, it seems a tad unfair that Waterworld is probably the most notorious box office "bomb" in history, when unlike many similarly problematic movies, it actually managed to at least meet its budget at the box office.