How ‘Cutthroat Island’ Lost a Fortune Revealed in ‘Box Office Poison’

Hollywood’s most notable bombs are — sadly — just as well-known as its biggest hits, a factor that a new book joyously celebrates. 

From British film critic Tim Robey, “Box Office Poison” digs up the dirt on some of cinema’s wildest misfires, from grand follies to misunderstood masterpieces, disastrous sequels to catastrophic literary adaptations, going behind the scenes to examine how they ended careers, bankrupted studios and changed film history.

Among the features in Robey’s crosshairs are David Lynch’s “Dune,” plus “Speed 2: Cruise Control,” “Gigli,” “Catwoman,” “Pan” and — of course — “Cats.”

In this exclusive extract from the book, being released by Hanover Square Press in the U.S. on Nov. 5, it’s the turn of the swashbuckling catastrophe that was Renny Harlin and Geana Davis’ “Cutthroat Island.” Costing upwards of $115 million to make, the watery flop sank almost without a trace in 1995, earning just $18.5 million globally and dragging a once hit-making production company down into the depths with it. 

Read the excerpt from “Box Office Poison” below.

Geena Davis and Renny Harlin got married in September 1993. Their weekend involved a hoedown, hot air balloons and a sunset ceremony in the ruins of an old Napa winery. They’d met just six months before, because Davis wanted to find an action vehicle to supercharge the next phase of her career, and her agents effected an introduction to the Finnish director which clearly went well. 

Harlin may have been a good notch below the James Cameron stratosphere, but he’d just climbed some peaks with “Die Hard 2” (1990), then the banger that is “Cliffhanger” (1993) – essentially “Die High,” with Stallone foiling thieves while dangling off mountains.

“Cliffhanger” had been the baby of Carolco, the independent hit factory whose Lebanese chief, Mario Kassar, was an industry titan, without whose bankrolling power the action-blockbuster scene of the early 1990s would have been in much poorer shape.

Kassar was coming off back-to-back megahits with Paul Verhoeven, namely “Total Recall” (1990) and “Basic Instinct” (1992), which thrust a hungry Sharon Stone into the limelight. He had no end of trouble striking the various deals to make “Terminator 2: Judgement Day” (1991) happen, but the splurge was worth it. From its record-breaking $102 million budget, it would become the third-highest grossing film ever made at that time, behind only “ET” and “Star Wars.”

Carolco’s business plan was top-heavy, in that they only needed one of these whoppers each year to fund any number of smaller efforts. “I have to go for it,” Kassar told the Los Angeles Times in 1990. His company had a fleet of stretch limos with Carolco plates constantly on the prowl around Bel-Air, and they threw Cannes parties at the Hotel du Cap that went down in legend.

They were haemorrhaging fast. In 1989, Kassar had parted ways with his founding partner, the more cautious Andrew G Vajna, who’d been paid $100m for his share in the company. In 1991 alone, Carolco posted a loss of $265 million; they restructured in 1992 and sold off shares in 1993. Their deal on “Cliffhanger” had been a gruelling mess, with TriStar and others stepping in to co-finance because of their existing debts. 

Things were getting desperate. They had to have a money-spinner ready for the summer of 1995. Paul Verhoeven came to them in early 1994 with his next big Arnie pitch, a $100 million historical epic called “Crusade,” billed as “Spartacus” meets “Conan.” Carolco wanted guarantees from Verhoeven that the overall budget would climb no higher. Throwing an infamous wobbly at a last-ditch meeting, he walked. The film never got made.

Carolco now threw all their eggs into the only remaining basket before them: “Cutthroat Island,” a rough-and-ready script which Kassar had optioned as far back as 1990. 

Davis was content to play Morgan Adams, a swashbuckling pirate’s daughter hunting for part of a treasure map in 1668 Jamaica, so long as Michael Douglas, angling for a lighter romp after his post-“Basic Instinct” hot streak, would be William Shaw, a roguish, Errol-Flynn-alike con artist who steals her heart. Much derring-do, in their quest for unimaginable riches, would ensue. Would it do? Pirate films hadn’t been in vogue for years, but Harlin was gambling on a “Captain Blood” (1935) revival with wild stunts. Douglas wanted it to be “Romancing the Stone” (1984) all over again.

No one could get the script to work. Filming was meant to start in January 1994, then June, then September. Douglas, who was being paid $13 million, wanted the male part beefed up; instead, Davis’s role was the one that kept growing, to Harlin’s specifications. On July 11, citing dismay at all these developments, Douglas bailed.

The list of names who were sought, in mounting desperation, to fill his shoes is a who’s who of (all-white) A-list talent from the mid-1990s. Tom Cruise, Mel Gibson, Keanu Reeves, Liam Neeson, Jeff Bridges, Ralph Fiennes, Charlie Sheen, Michael Keaton, Tim Robbins, Daniel Day-Lewis, Kurt Russell and Gabriel Byrne were all offered it. No one took the bait. The script was becoming notorious around town as Harlin’s wedding gift to his new wife, not a boon to any leading man who wanted to keep his edge or pulling power.

At long last, they secured Matthew Modine. 15 years Douglas’s junior, Modine was still best-known for his leading role as Joker in Kubrick’s “Full Metal Jacket” (1987), but hadn’t exactly set box offices alight in the years since. Everyone knew it was non-star casting, dictated by Carolco’s ever-worsening state of emergency. 

As was his wont, Kassar had bullishly presold foreign rights to the film, so the lavish location shoots (in Malta and Thailand) could go ahead. This meant Carolco had been paid $50-60 million by an assortment of distributors already, and needed a film to show for it. “We knew from that point that if we lost ‘Cutthroat Island’ as well, bankruptcy would be inevitable,” said a former executive to the Independent in 1996. “If we made the film, there was at least some chance we could survive.”

The situation this put Harlin and Davis in was unenviable.

“We begged to be let go,” Harlin said in 2011. “Geena was scared mindless about headlining this film. We felt that a pirate movie with a female lead was suicidal, but we were contractually obligated. And we were so concerned about the script at that point that I personally spent $1 million of my own money [to hire] Mark Norman.”

Harlin had been so sidetracked by all the rewrites, not to mention recasting his male lead, that he’d taken his eye off the set-building, which was proceeding apace without him. “If we build it, will he come?” became the crew’s credo. 1,000 feet of buildings along the quayside in Malta needed new façades erected, to double as Port Royal in 1668. The director didn’t appreciate what he eventually saw, and insisted much of it was ripped down and started again.

The film’s two pirate ships, the Morning Star and the Reaper, had 20 working cannons on each side – full-sized replicas of 17th century craft which cost $1 million each. If Harlin was forced to do this thing, he wasn’t going to do it by halves. “Our imagination and sense of invention cannot be limited by mundane reality,” he’d written to his crew in a July 1994 staff memo, which later got leaked to the press. “I don’t want big, I want huge. I don’t want fast, I want explosive. I don’t want accidents, I want disasters.”

Even though they used giant tanks in Malta to avoid the perils of the open sea, the shoot was a perfect storm. The cinematographer, Oliver Wood, fell off a crane into one of the tanks in the first week, breaking his leg, and had to be replaced by Peter Levy. Harlin squabbled a lot, including with the producer David Nichols, who quit, as did the art director, Wolf Kroeger. He tussled with the chief camera operator, Nicola Pecorini, then fired him, causing more than two dozen other crew to walk out in sympathy. 

Modine had a rough time – with several head injuries requiring stitches – even before the damning reviews.

“I felt like I had my stomach cut open and my guts spread all over the United States,” he said on reading them. The script he’d signed up to had been the one Douglas had okayed, not the new one “about a girl and her journey”. “It’s the first movie I’ve worked on where the director never really spoke to me,” he shrugged a year later. “Renny spent a lot of his time just finding new ways to blow things up. He likes to blow things up.”

When the shoot finished in Thailand, with a wrap party on April Fool’s Day, Davis and Harlin had already run for the hills. Kassar had wheedled an extra $40 million out of a European banking syndicate just so the film could cross the finish line. The release date had to be shunted from summer 1995 to a much more competitive slot in December. During those few short months, Carolco’s number was up.

With the IRS on their case, the company filed for bankruptcy in November 1995, Kassar resigned and Canal+ bought their film library. The pre-release press around “Cutthroat Island,” especially in the wake of “Waterworld,” was so hostile that no one had much enthusiasm, let alone money, for promotion come Christmas. It opened in 11th place at the U.S. box office, with a shudder-worthy screen average, while the likes of “Toy Story,” “Jumanji” and the debuting “Waiting to Exhale” got everyone’s four bucks instead. Within two weeks, it had disappeared.

The wrong assumption for years was that “Cutthroat Island” ruined Carolco. It was costly, slow to make, feebly written and lopsidedly cast, but these were only the final nails in a long-assembled coffin. If anything, it was the other way round: the company’s dire straits doomed the film at birth. 

When Disney agreed to the first “Pirates of the Caribbean” (2003), they were biting their nails from the memory of this capsizing. There’s far less separating the two than people like to argue, other than Johnny Depp pulling off a polysexual one-man show, to wizardly effect, in the middle of one of them. The Disney one! It speaks to the crapshoot of blockbuster economics that Depp’s franchise span off to four sequels and $4.5 billion worldwide, while this cursed pearl gets brought up every time Harlin so much as steps out of the house.

The couple got to make one more film together, which was already locked to shoot just weeks after “Cutthroat” bombed. “The Long Kiss Goodnight” (1996), from one of Shane Black’s better scripts, was a kicky thriller about an amnesiac assassin. Though a minor cult classic, it only broke even at the time – undoubtedly dented by their previous collaboration. 

Their marriage didn’t last much longer. Davis found out that Harlin was fathering a child with her personal assistant, and they divorced in 1998. After getting back to business by giving sharks bigger brains in the gleefully idiotic “Deep Blue Sea” (1999), Harlin’s only had one palpable hit since, a Jackie Chan/Johnny Knoxville buddy-cop comedy called “Skiptrace” (2016), which was huge in China and nowhere else. Davis retreated from films to a muted second act on TV, while Modine reverted to the peculiar little indies he clearly prefers, before a comeback in “Stranger Things.”

“Cutthroat” held them all at knifepoint, in the end. It’s very daft, childishly engaging, and there are far worse films – even pirate flicks starring Johnny Depp – that have piled up glittering fortunes. Scrape off the barnacles, shoot some rum, and it does have the blurry allure of sunken treasure.