BASEketball may have been eerily prescient when it comes to the world of professional sports, but it was a major flop back in 1998, earning just over $7 million at the box office. For context, some of the movies that made more money than BASEketball that year included Billy Crystal’s dud My Giant and Kevin Costner’s notoriously disastrous epic about post-apocalyptic mail carriers.
Today, BASEketball certainly has its admirers. And while stars Trey Parker and Matt Stone clearly aren’t among them, the duo have gone on the record as saying that their experience working on the David Zucker-directed bomb was actually a big help when they were making South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut the following year.
During a 2017 interview with The Conversation Hour, Parker and Stone said that the opportunity to star in a Hollywood film from the director of The Naked Gun, so soon after the breakout success of South Park, was impossible to turn down. “They’re giving us money, we’d better take it,” Parker reasoned at the time.
“Don’t regret it. But it’s, like, kind of half ours,” Stone explained. “It’s like part of us is in that. But I think we wanted to rewrite every scene the way we wanted to do it. But we learned a lot.”
“It definitely made the South Park movie way better than it would have been,” Parker admitted.
When pressed on how exactly the failed sports comedy informed the Oscar-nominated South Park feature, Stone clarified that “we learned about the kind of comedy we wanted to do. We learned about earning your way to a joke,” adding, “we love the Zucker brothers, like that kind of comedy, but we realized that it’s not exactly what we do.”
They also specified that the BASEketball experience was eye-opening from a business perspective. “We learned how to deal with a studio,” Parker recalled. “Because we had no experience. We’d done guerilla independent movies but we had never done a studio movie… We learned, in terms of marketing and things like that, to hold onto our stuff, and to drive a hard bargain and everything.”
Who knows, if not for BASEketball, Paramount might have convinced Parker and Stone to make South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut PG-friendly (which would have been bad news for a certain Will Smith movie).
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