V8 Vegetable Juice: how a healthy beverage helped kill a movie studio
Any expensive movie presents an inherent set of risks, with nobody being completely confident a film will take off among audiences until it arrives in cinemas. That said, there are certain instances where everybody knows an incoming blockbuster will be declared dead on arrival. Sometimes, the reverberations are so severe that an entire studio can implode.
Throughout history, there have been a number of movies somewhere between surprising and alarming that have conspired to almost single-handedly kill a once-thriving production house. The reasons can vary from rampant financial mismanagement to exorbitant budgets and allegedly ‘game-changing’ technology that falls flat on its face, but there’s only one where vegetable juice was implicated.
In retrospect, 1995’s Cutthroat Island should have been put out of its misery long before cameras started rolling. Renny Harlin was a proven director with a solid track record at the box office with Bruce Willis’ Die Hard 2 and Sylvester Stallone’s Cliffhanger under his belt, but the alarm bells started ringing when he teamed up with then-wife Geena Davis for an old-fashioned swashbuckling epic.
For one thing, the pirate movie hadn’t been bankable in a long time, making Cutthroat Island a huge gamble from the very beginning. Another and exponentially more concerning factor was that nobody was remotely interested in playing the male lead, William Shaw, opposite Davis’ Morgan Adams.
Michael Douglas was originally set for the part, but when he dropped out, the feelers were put out to Tom Cruise, Liam Neeson, Charlie Sheen, Daniel Day-Lewis, Gabriel Byrne, Tim Robbins, Jeff Bridges, Keanu Reeves, Ralph Fiennes, Russell Crowe, all of whom said no. By the process of elimination, Matthew Modine ended up with the gig, and helped shed a light on why the production spiralled so ridiculously out of control.
Sets were built without Harlin’s approval, and when he didn’t like what he saw, he ordered them to be torn down and rebuilt, delaying the start of shooting. The director also fired a camera operator after an argument, which caused more than 20 crew members to quit in protest. The script was constantly being rewritten, Carolco Pictures was already struggling against mountainous debts, and a burst pipe caused raw sewage to flow into the massive water tank being used, adding insult to injury.
Where exactly does vegetable juice factor into such a ludicrous tale of excess and agony? According to Modine, Harlin and Davis had specifically requested a hefty supply of V8 to be shipped out to the set in Malta at great expense. The actor revealed that he stumbled upon an entire room that was packed wall-to-wall with crates of the stuff that hadn’t been touched, which ended up being handed over to the crew in a desperate effort to whittle down the supply.
An abundance of V8 vegetable juice wasn’t the main reason why Cutthroat Island tanking so spectacularly at the box office that it pushed Carolco into an early grave and pumped the brakes on the mouth-watering prospect of Total Recall duo Paul Verhoeven and Arnold Schwarzenegger reuniting for historical epic Crusade, but it was nonetheless endemic of how much money was freely being wasted on the entire debacle without anyone bothering to think of the long-term repercussions.
