Cutthroat Island – A Career Shipwrecker. By Simon Thompson.
Finnish director Renny Harlin’s Cutthroat Island is one of those movies that studio bosses talk about around a great campfire as a kind of haunted cautionary tale. This is a movie which killed an entire studio, multiple careers, and stopped a whole genre in its tracks for nearly a decade all in one fell swoop, with a graceful laser-like precision reminiscent of a Luka Modric pass.
Drinking alongside Shanghai Surprise and John Carter in the box office bomb saloon, this is a movie with an equally torturous production and a corrosive fallout to boot, making it the perfect candidate for a retrospective.
The Instability of Carolco Pictures
If you’re a 1980s-90s action movie fan like me, seeing the Carolco Pictures sign before the movie starts is almost always an indicator of good quality. While on one the one hand the studio was riding high into the 1990s with multiple successes under their belt, on the other Carolco was financially in a ditch. Despite producing massive action blockbuster hits such as The Rambo Trilogy, Total Recall, Terminator 2, Stargate, and Cliffhanger (not to mention cult favourites such as Angel Heart, Homeboy, They Live, King Of New York, Johnny Handsome and Jacob’s Ladder), Carolco’s most high profile projects such as Total Recall and Terminator 2 commanded insanely expensive budgets due to the high priced salaries afforded to stars/directors such as Arnold Schwarzenegger, Paul Verhoeven, James Cameron, and Sylvester Stallone.
This meant that despite the massive box office success that many of their movies enjoyed, Carolco was teetering on the edge because they were spending so much on the budgets and the various bonuses for directors and stars. This meant that the studio literally couldn’t afford to have a single major box office failure, for fear of either bankruptcy or being asset stripped by much more established studios such as Paramount and 20th Century Fox.
Enter a pair of young scriptwriters, Michael Frost Beckner and James Gorman. Beckner and Gorman, were making waves in Hollywood with a spec script they had sold to Disney in the early 1990s, a western titled Texas Lead And Gold. The company’s purchase of their script, locked them into a development deal- with the studio having the right to see any further scripts that the duo wrote first.
What Beckner and Gorman really wanted to make was a swashbuckling pirate adventure movie in the vein of the Errol Flynn classics ( e.g. Captain Blood) and the Robert Newton version of Treasure Island. After researching historical archives about piracy at the Huntington Library in California, the duo wanted to combine the adventure movies of the 1930s-50s with the knowing, rapid dialogue of contemporary action fare such as The Princess Bride and Lethal Weapon.
Beckner and Gorman’s script was an action-packed, dark, pirate adventure comedy, centred around a secret volcanic island containing treasure, with a backstory involving a group of Spanish and British officers ransacking a gold shipment before being betrayed. The script subsequently jumps forward in time, with the men from the flashback all now involved in positions of power, with William Shaw, the anti-hero protagonist, learning of the treasure and setting out on a path to find it. On his quest, Shaw is being stalked by a notorious pirate known as The Scar, who is intent on collecting the founder’s map pieces together so he can visit the island and find the treasure for himself.
The deuteragonist Morgan Adams is the innocent daughter of one of the men who originally found the gold (now a village doctor), who becomes involved in the adventure and knows part of where the treasure is, due to a piece of her dad’s map being hidden in a lullaby sung to her as a child.
Beckner and Gorman originally pitched the script to Disney as an adaptation of their Pirates Of The Caribbean theme park ride. Disney head honcho Michael Eisner turned them down because he believed, in his infinite wisdom, that a movie based on a theme park ride wouldn’t amount to anything. After Disney’s refusal, Beckner and Gorman had a meeting with Carolco pictures who in desperate need of their next hit to keep the lights on, bought the script for $1.7 million.
Pre-Production
When Carolco bought the rights, the studio was heavily in debt and had undergone a corporate restructuring process headed by the French company StudioCanal. As a result they had to secure foreign distribution rights absurdly early into the production process, meaning that even if Cutthroat Island just about managed to break even it would still be a serious defeat. Coming in at a sizable budget of $60 million ($133 million in 2026), the making of Cutthroat Island meant that Carolco had to either sell or cancel everything else they were working on, so they could afford to shoot it.
To raise the money, studio heads Mario Kassar and Andrew Vajna were forced to scrap development on a Paul Verhoeven and Arnold Schwarzenegger historical epic, Crusade,to put its $13 million toward Cutthroat Island and sell large stakes in other productions on their slate including another Paul Verhoeven project Showgirls, Roland Emmerich’s Stargate, and a western starring Tom Berenger called Last Of The Dogmen. Kassar’ and Vajna’s logic was that Cutthroat Island was a mass appeal PG-13 adventure romp that families could take their kids to watch, with a built in cross audience appeal which would result in guaranteed large box office profits. A bloody R rated historical epic like Crusade on the other hand, was a far riskier proposition for a company that needed to get itself into the black again (side note Crusade is one of the most tantalising unmade movies of the 90s and from the material available about it online would have been a true epic in every sense of the word).
Hirings and extensive re-writes
Carolco brought in Finnish director Renny Harlin on the grounds that the studio saw him as a safe pair of hands, due to his twin box office successes in Die Hard 2 and Cliffhanger. Harlin’s hiring immediately impacted the casting process, as he begged Mario Kassar to cast his then wife Geena Davis as Morgan Adams. Davis was keen to pivot from being seen as a light comedy actress (known for movies such as The Accidental Tourist and A League of Their Own) to becoming an action-adventure star instead. Davis saw Cutthroat Island as the movie to do just that, with Harlin successfully convincing the studio she was right for the part.
For the role of William Shaw, Michael Douglas (who was still a huge box office draw/leading man at this point) was cast. The problem with Douglas’s casting is that he agreed to be involved on two strict conditions, the first was that filming had to commence immediately because of his inflexibly busy schedule, and the second was that his character had to have the same amount of screen time as Davis’s did. As pre-production rolled on Douglas became more and more frustrated because of the various script rewrites that beefed up the role of Morgan Adams to being the protagonist at his character’s expense.
Realising that Carolco weren’t even going to meet him at least halfway on his conditions, Douglas quit Cutthroat Island right in the middle of pre-production. Carolco and Harlin were now without a male lead, so they went and offered the part of William Shaw to almost every major 1990s male movie star you can possibly think of. Tom Cruise, Keanu Reeves, Liam Neeson, Russell Crowe, Jeff Bridges, Ralph Fiennes, Tim Robbins, Charlie Sheen, Michael Keaton, Gabriel Byrne, and Daniel Day Lewis were all offered the part and turned it down.
In an act of desperation, the studio turned to Matthew Modine who agreed to take on the role mainly because of his experience as a fencer. There was also an attempt to bring in famed British actor/ one man anti-temperance crusader Oliver Reed as the character of Mordechai Fingers, but he was canned after he got himself in a bar fight and was rumoured to have drunkenly tried to flash his Hannibal Brooks at Geena Davis – with George Murcell being hired instead.
While Davis and Harlin wanted to leave at the same time as Michael Douglas did, having lost faith in the production her contract option trapped her into completing Cutthroat Island with a clause that probably would have sued her into oblivion if she tried to leave.
The Shoot
While the star search was going on, it diverted Harlin’s attention away from the set itself, by the time Modine was cast, Harlin returned to set in Malta and was in for a rude awakening. While he had been gone the script had been rewritten and the set had already been built, with both being to Harlin’s distaste. As a result this immediately led to extensive and costly rebuilding/rewrites ( Harlin paid almost a $1 million of his own money to finance rewrites) , delaying an already expensive shoot tenfold.
Things went from bad to even worse when Harlin fired the movie’s chief camera operator Nicola Pecorini, following a heated argument. Nearly two dozen crew members walked out in a show of solidarity, meaning that Carolco now had to spend even more money to hire a new crew at short notice.
To pour more petrol on an already flaming bonfire, the set’s broken pipe system caused raw sewage to flood into the water tank where the cast were supposed to swim. Speaking of water tanks, initial cinematographer Oliver Wood fell off a crane and into one of the water tanks, breaking his leg. This meant that even more money had to be spent in hiring a new cinematographer, Peter Levy.
When the crew wasn’t being injured, it was the cast’s turn, as ,director Harlin put a large emphasis on actors doing their own stunts when possible. This resulted in Matthew Modine hitting his head on a fallen barrel during the tavern escape sequence, and Geena Davis picking up multiple injuries on set; most prominently during a take where she fell out of an open window a second too soon, rolling down off the roof and landing under a heavy horse-drawn carriage, being a mere inch away from a life debilitating injury.
What was really eating into the movie’s budget, however, apart from the constant crew changes, was a gruesome twosome of shooting style as well as Harlin and Davis’s love for a specific juice. As a director, Harlin loved having three cameras all rolling at the same time, which further tripled the shooting budget. Harlin and Davis also spent large sums of the budget on having cases of V8 vegetable juice shipped to the Malta set for them to drink, to the extent that at the end of shooting an entire room was full of untouched V8 juice and everyone on set was obliged to finish it.
Through all of the delays and mishaps the $60 million originally afforded to Cutthroat Island ballooned, Mr Creosote style, to $98 million ( $214 million in 2026) meaning that the movie would have to put in a box office performance as good as that of Terminator 2 or Tim Burton’s Batman (1989)to have any hope of saving Carolco.
Box Office Capsizing
Due to the inflation that the shooting budget reached and the combined dire financial situations of Carolco and the movie’s co-distributor MGM, Cutthroat Island had a non-existent marketing budget to work with. This meant that it was going to have to rely on positive critical reception and strong word of mouth to have any hope of making even half of its budget back.
Critics absolutely tore Cutthroat Island apart, with the likes The New York Times writer Janet Maslin commenting that “ it’s not possible to believe [Geena Davis] is the highly respected captain of a pirate ship and it’s not even fun to try”. Even the slightly more positive reviews still carried a sting, with Empire Magazine giving it two stars out of five criticising its story but praising its action set pieces calling the final action scene -‘ John Woo on water”. Roger Ebert gave it three stars out of four, calling it “ [a] short, a satisfactory movie – but it doesn’t transcend its genre, and it’s not surprising or astonishing. I saw it because that was my job and, having seen it, I grant its skill, and award it three stars on that basis. But unless you’re really into pirate movies, it’s not a necessary film.”
Released in North America in December 1995, Cutthroat Island debuted at 13th in the domestic box office, facing insanely tough competition from adult crime films such as Heat and Casino, comedies such as Get Shorty, rival blockbusters such as the latest James Bond movie Goldeneye, and other family films such as Toy Story (which lorded over the top of the rankings) and Jumanji. Taking only $10 million in domestic gross, the movie was a comprehensive financial failure given its vast budget.
Internationally it fared barely any better, grossing only $6 million worldwide despite the various distribution deals that Carolco had worked out months ahead of release. Adjusted for inflation (as of 2023) it’s the fifth biggest money loser in movie history, and won a Guinness World Record for the largest box office collapse in 2012.
Having bet everything on Cutthroat Island, Carolco filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy in November 1995, taking with them one of the most in demand back catalogues of movies in recent Hollywood history.
Career Aftermaths
Although Renny Harlin has still worked steadily in the thirty years since Cutthroat Island he is still, understandably, seen as untrustworthy with a large scale production to this day by the various accountants and studio heads that run Hollywood. Despite having one underrated gem in The Long Kiss Goodnight and the so bad it’s good Deep Blue Sea on his CV, he’s become a journeyman director flitting from one undistinguished project to another, eking out survival.
Short of Carolco itself, the individual whose career has truly never recovered from this is unfortunately Geena Davis. Before Cutthroat Island, Geena Davis was a legitimate movie star and box office draw(pre Cutthroat Island she commanded the same stardom as the likes of Sharon Stone, Julia Roberts or Michelle Pfeiffer) with her ability to bounce from dark adult dramas such as David Cronenberg’s The Fly to comedies such as Ridley Scott’s Thelma and Louise showcasing her versatility as a performer.
After Cutthroat Island she’s been designated box office poison and her career has dissipated at a staggering rate, having retreated into recurring tv roles and supporting parts in various indie projects a far cry from the A list status that she used to enjoy in the mid-1980s-1995. This is a shame because I would take a truckload of Geena Davis’s performances over whatever flavour of the month plank of wood that Hollywood tries to make a thing every ten months.
While the pirate genre wasn’t exactly a thriving one before Cutthroat Island came along – its financial misfortunes convinced Hollywood studios that the genre was certain box office death until the release of Pirates Of The Caribbean : Curse Of The Black Pearl in 2003 ( adapted from that very same theme park ride that Michael Eisner thought was a terrible idea to base a movie around) which restored the genre’s bankability again almost overnight.
Overall Legacy
As a movie itself, Cutthroat Island is a perfectly serviceable 2 hour action movie which does nothing really special or interesting with its material. Davis and Modine are an odd pairing as a romantic duo, and Davis herself is horrendously miscast as Morgan Adams. What did for Cutthroat Island is that it’s merely adequate, and given the stakes and pressure that it was under to succeed, its mere adequacy in a release schedule of vastly superior movies was why it flopped in the way it did.
Hindsight is of course 20/20, but this movie might have succeeded had they stuck with Beckner and Gorman’s original darker script and hired a different director (without a personal stake in casting their wife and turning her into an action star) into the fold.
Overall Cutthroat Island is both a cautionary tale about the pitfalls of blockbuster filmmaking, and also an example of how, despite being one of the most notorious turkeys of the last thirty years, the actual movie itself is nowhere near as bad as its box office takings and critical reception would suggest. Of course, it’s nothing approaching a masterpiece, but since it’s the movie which sunk the career of Geena Davis, its legacy feels more than a little unfair given that numerous other stars who have also appeared in other high profile flops are given a chance to rebound back.
What does make this worse however, is that this movie is responsible for both the god awful Terminator sequels after Terminator 2 because Carolco’s bankruptcy put the rights up for grabs, and why we never got to see Paul Verhoeven’s Crusade so for that it has justifiably earned its place in cinema damnation.
