Revisiting Cutthroat Island, the Feminist Pirate Movie That Failed
The 1995 movie Cutthroat Island has the dubious honor of at one point holding the title of biggest Hollywood flop. As the Guinness Book of World Records explained in honoring the film, it cost roughly $100 million to make but earned back only $11 million worldwide. Green lit during the girl power boom of the ’90s and starring Geena Davis as a pirate who galavants around in search of buried treasure, studio executives obviously had faith that a woman could not only lead an action movie but make it successful. How could such a theory go so wrong? Is it because women can’t be pirates?
I set out on a journey across the high seas to find out.
Having never heard of Cutthroat Island before my roommate suggested we watch it after paging through HBOGo on a recent Sunday night–with a laugh, I might note, like she evilly knew what she was suggesting–I wasn’t quite sure what I was in for. I assumed it’d be a bit like Romancing the Stone – ridiculous but very very good. But soon after the movie began, I realized my mistake and began to search for more intel on this swashbuckling hellscape. I quickly dug through the facts, theories and rumors about what contributed to this sinking ship (a pun used, unsurprisingly, in many headlines after the movie’s release).
The first foreshadowing: Michael Douglas pulled out of Cutthroat Island when he found out his role as leading man wouldn’t be as prominent as Davis’s. (After that, many other Hollywood stars reportedly turned the part down too.) The movie also lost a producer, money was spent frivolously, and the script was downright bad, requiring an expensive rewrite. The fact that director Renny Harlin had married Davis right before making the movie added a sort of dark twist to the whole thing. (Davis, when she was doing press for the film: “Renny has been working on Cutthroat Island practically our whole married life. It was actually wonderful to have something to work on that we both cared so passionately about.” Harlin: “When we were at home, we would be rehearsing while we were in bed or brushing our teeth or whatever. We’d be talking about the movie. It was an incredible privilege to be able to do that.”)
All that effort on the part of Harlin and Davis didn’t matter; the movie was pulled from U.S. theaters after two weeks and the production company behind Cutthroat Island (also responsible for Showgirls) declared bankruptcy shortly after the movie came out. “Part of the disappointment is that we deliberately made that movie PG and it was beamed at younger audiences,” Davis told The Dallas Morning News in 1996. “I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be fun if girls could see a woman being a pirate and swashbuckling?’ It was one of those things where it fell through the cracks. There were 10 million other movies opening that day and for whatever reasons, the audience we targeted was not informed they were supposed to go.”
Shockingly, when the film came out, Roger Ebert gave it three stars. This is shocking not only because of how badly it did at the box office, but because most other reviewers at the time were very unkind to it. Cutthroat Island hasn’t aged well either; when Nathan Rabin revisted it in 2008 he wrote that it “resurrects the moribund pirate movie, just to bury it all over again. It runs the gamut from workmanlike to dull to egregiously awful.”
How could this be so? Geena Davis plays a pirate and she did all her own stunts! Well sometimes, a bad movie is just a bad movie, even when you want it to be otherwise.
We start off with Pirate Lady aka Geena Davis in bed with a man who is supposed to be sexy but is just Wig.
He wants to kill her! God, a one night stand can take a turn for the worst really quickly.
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