8) Cutthroat Island
Production Budget: $98 million
Worldwide Box Office Total: $10,017,322
It takes a special kind of disaster mentality to craft a movie that doesn’t just sink individual careers, but sinks a studio as well. But really, Carolco’s meteoric rise and enormous fall could be an article in and of itself, the point here is that the studio, in a last gasp effort to turn their financial troubles around, bet huge on the box office clout of pirate movies, Renny Harlin and the dynamic duo of Geena Davis and Matthew Modine.
The signs were there that this was not going to end well for all involved. Michael Douglas was originally cast as the male lead of Cutthroat, but the actor had only limited time to commit and when Davis, then married to Harlin, was made the ostensive star of the film, Douglas backed out. With Harlin’s attention focused on re-casting, set construction and art direction work on the film continued without much of the director’s input, resulting, ultimately, in a lot of that period production design being redone on the fly, and quite expensively, as production got underway. Meanwhile, a veritable who’s who of leading men – Tom Cruise, Keanu Reeves, Charlie Sheen, and Michael Keaton – turned down the role of slave-turned-love interest William Shaw. Eventually, Modine, then best known for his role as Joker in Full Metal Jacket, was cast based in no small part on his pre-existing fencing skills.
The end result? In two words: not good. Cutthroat Island premiered in 13th place at the Christmas box office and ultimately took in just over $10 million in total. Harlin has since pointed out that Carolco was in dire straits before Cutthroat was released, which is true, but neither his career, nor that of future ex-wife Davis, would ever really recover:
Davis retreated to TV where she hasn’t had much better success, Harlin’s last studio effort was the WWE-produced 12 Rounds starring wrestler John Cena, and Modine enjoyed a brief brush with relevance playing a Gotham City cop in last summer’s The Dark Knight Rises. Pirate movies would enjoy a brief resurgence with Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, but the curse seems mostly to belong to Cutthroat Island.