The Waterboy was released on November 6, 1998, and quickly became the most successful film of Adam Sandler’s career up to that point. Although the movie received mixed reviews from critics, it raked in over $190 million at the box office, eclipsing the profits from Sandler’s previous efforts like Billy Madison and Happy Gilmore by more than $100 million. Here’s the weird thing about those numbers: Within a couple of weeks, sources were reporting that a lot of people who paid full price for a ticket were walking out before the movie started. Did that many people coincidentally decide that they weren’t interested in watching it without seeing any of it, or did they all suddenly realize that they had somewhere else to be?
The answer has to do with one of the trailers that preceded The Waterboy during its second week in theaters. At the time, George Lucas’s Lucasfilm Ltd. unveiled the teaser trailer for the much-anticipated Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace, the first new Star Wars film to appear on the big screen in 15 years. Needless to say, fans of the popular sci-fi franchise were excited for something new—and evidently not all were interested in sticking around for a goofy Adam Sandler movie. Here’s how one crowd reacted to the trailer back in 1998:
The Phantom Menace teaser was also shown before screenings of Meet Joe Black and the Denzel Washington movie The Siege, and had a similar effect on attendance. A November 19, 1998, article from The Hollywood Reporter reveals that attendance rates for The Siege jumped by 1,147% at one theater the day the trailer was first screened, drawing a “near-hysterical reaction from the crowd.” “This is incredible,” Paul Dergarabedian, the president of the Exhibitor Relations Company, said at the time. “We’ve never heard of a trailer packing people into a theater. It’s a precedent-setting event.”
Some theater owners eventually got wise and started showing the trailer at the end of each movie as well, in the hopes that Star Wars fans would stay put and buy some popcorn as they sat through a film they couldn’t care less about. Though it may seem silly to some that so many people missed out on seeing such a beloved Sandler movie, the $8 they all blew on tickets to it certainly didn’t do anything to hurt Sandler’s career. It’s just too bad that The Waterboy couldn’t bring in anything close to the $1.046 billion The Phantom Menace earned after its release in May of the following year.
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