The Waterboy (1998) on Netflix
Bobby Boucher, a stuttering water boy for a college team, is fired and joins the Mud Dogs, who have lost 40 straight games. One tackle gets their coach's attention.
- Netflix3.5/5
- IMDb6.2/10194,243 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes34%
Trailer
Plot summary
Bobby Boucher stutters, is 31, and carries water for the University of Louisiana football team. He lives with Helen, his deeply religious and overprotective mother, and believes dehydration killed his father in the Sahara. The Cougars' players torment him, and their head coach, Red Beaulieu, dismisses him after 18 years. Bobby turns up at South-Central Louisiana State, whose Mud Dogs have dropped 40 games in a row, and volunteers to work for them without pay. He becomes friendly with Derek Wallace, the kicker. When his new teammates tease him, Coach Klein urges him to answer back, and Bobby knocks quarterback Gee Grenouille flat. Klein asks Helen to let her son join the squad; she refuses, saying the game is too dangerous. Klein persuades Bobby to play anyway, and Bobby becomes the team's outside linebacker.
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Cast
- Al Whitingas Casey Bugge
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Waterboy (1998)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Herlihy could not believe their luck in getting Kathy Bates to play Boucher's mother. Bates' agent did not want her to do the film, and Bates threw the script in the trash after reading some pages, not being interested in football, until her niece spotted Sandler's name and convinced her to reconsider.
- Writer Tim Herlihy said the story was intended to invert the formula of his previous films. With Happy Gilmore "it was a very straight world that he was the disruptive element in", whereas this was "a funhouse, crazy version of Southern college football milieu" and the first movie where things were funny when Sandler was not on screen.
- The idea for The Waterboy came from one of Adam Sandler's Saturday Night Live characters. Sandler said you could compare him to "Canteen Boy", as he does love water and they both get picked on a lot, but that what he liked most was that the character is a genuine, good person.
- The film opened at number 1 at the US box office, earning $39,414,071 in its opening weekend, a record opening for November that surpassed Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls.
- The film topped the United Kingdom box office on the weekend of its release there in April 1999, and as of 2020 The Waterboy is the highest-grossing film in the sports comedy genre.
- Comparisons are often made between former LSU head coach Ed Orgeron and the Waterboy character Farmer Fran, due to Orgeron's Louisiana roots, Cajun heritage and accent.
- For his role Sandler was nominated for a Golden Raspberry Award for Worst Actor, while the Stinkers Bad Movie Awards gave him their award for Most Annoying Fake Accent in 1998.
