Thirty-one years ago, the producers of ‘Rambo’ made one of the biggest flops in cinema history
In 1995, Geena Davis starred in a high-seas adventure that failed to find its audience - and spectacularly failed to recoup its budget.
A box-office hit is every studio’s dream, but there’s a wide gulf between merely falling short of expectations and suffering a catastrophic failure. Film history is filled with a handful of productions so disastrous that they shook the industry to its core. One of them was Cutthroat Island, the 1995 swashbuckling adventure that almost nobody went to see.
Directed by Renny Harlin, the film crashed and burned in spectacular fashion. Not only did it fail to earn back its budget - it came nowhere close. Production costs ballooned to roughly $115 million, while the movie grossed only about $16 million worldwide. The fallout proved devastating for Carolco Pictures, the independent studio behind the Rambo franchise, which had been producing films since the 1970s.
Cutthroat Island - watch the trailer:
A pirate tale that never found its audience
In Cutthroat Island, Geena Davis stars as Morgan Adams, the daughter of a pirate captain. After her father’s death, she embarks on a high-seas quest to track down the three pieces of a treasure map. Because the map’s inscriptions are written in Latin, she purchases William Shaw (Matthew Modine) as a slave, relying on his ability to decipher the clues. As fate would have it, one of the map fragments is in the possession of her enemy - her uncle Dawg (Frank Langella) - who will stop at nothing to claim the treasure for himself.
Cutthroat Island is far from the only notorious flop in Hollywood history. Disney’s 2012 action-adventure film John Carter is also widely regarded as one of the biggest box-office disasters the industry has ever seen.
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