The movie that didn’t ruin Geena Davis’ career, according to Geena Davis
The 1980s produced many cinematic icons, but few have had the same legacy as Geena Davis. She was the star of some of the biggest films of the decade, from Beetlejuice to The Fly, Tootsie to The Accidental Tourist. This success continued into the early 1990s, with more hits like A League of Their Own, Hero, and Thelma & Louise. Then, one day, it stopped.
As the decade wore on, Davis became less and less prominent. Things reached the point where, between 1999 and 2006, she only had three film roles, and they were all from the Stuart Little franchise. Hollywood has always been a fickle business, especially for women, but this decline seemed especially brutal. If you ask some commentators, however, the moment everything changed can be located in a single film.
In 1995, Davis starred in the pirate-themed adventure movie Cutthroat Island. She played Morgan Adams, an intrepid swashbuckler who runs into a thief called William Shaw, played by Matthew Modine, on her quest to find the titular location and its buried treasure. Unfortunately, people just weren’t interested. It made just $16million on a budget of anywhere between $92 and $115million. The Guinness Book of World Records called it the ‘Largest Box Office Loss’ in Hollywood history, and it put the industry off pirate movies for almost a decade, until the success of the first Pirates of the Caribbean.
Much has been written about how Cutthroat Island torpedoed Davis’ career. She had another minor hit, The Long Kiss Goodnight, the following year, but the correlation between this film’s failure and her downturn in popularity is clear to see. It also didn’t help that she was suffering personal turmoil at the time, as she divorced her husband, Renny Harlin, who just so happened to be the director of Cutthroat Island, in 1998. However, if you ask Davis, people have got it all wrong.
“I want to clear up that it did not bring down Carolco,” Davis declared in The New Yorker. Carolco was the production company that worked on Cutthroat Island. They went bankrupt shortly after, with many blaming the film’s failure for their demise. “It was already facing bankruptcy before we even started making the movie,” she revealed. “The company was pretty much finished. This was its last production. We were doomed from the beginning, unfortunately. When the film came out, there was no money to promote it, so it was guaranteed that it wasn’t going to be successful. Somehow, people got fixated on how much it cost.”
According to Davis, she also really enjoyed working on The Long Kiss Goodnight. She puts the character she played in the film, a CIA assassin who loses her memories, on the same pedestal as Thelma from Thelma & Louise. For the record, Samuel L Jackson, her co-star on the project, said he loved working with her. Unfortunately, none of this was able to get her once-prolific career back on track.
It might have taken a little longer than expected, but Davis has found her feet again. She appeared in Zoë Kravitz’s directorial debut Blink Twice in 2024, as well as TV shows like The Exorcist and GLOW. Cutthroat Island still casts a long shadow over her, however, even if she herself doesn’t think so.
