The movie Geena Davis knew was doomed from the start: “She never wanted to do this picture”
In the mid-1990s, Geena Davis was at a crossroads in her career. After earning an Oscar nomination for 1991’s Thelma & Louise and following it up with the beloved women’s baseball film A League of Their Own, her next few projects didn’t fare as well.
1992’s Accidental Hero faired fine, but in 1994, both Angie and Speechless flopped hard at the box office. So when her husband, Die Hard 2 director Renny Harlin, suggested a shift in direction, Davis was nervous the project he had in mind would also fail. To everyone’s horror, she couldn’t have been more right.
When Carolco Pictures first purchased the rights to a swashbuckling pirate adventure script, the studio tapped Michael Douglas to take the lead in the movie. Mario Kassar, the studio’s top executive, pursued Harlin to direct, as they had just worked together on the 1993 hit Sylvester Stallone vehicle Cliffhanger. Kassar was after a package deal, though, because he wanted Harlin’s wife, Davis, to play the female lead, too.
Over the next few weeks, extensive work was undertaken on reshaping the script to convince Douglas to sign on the dotted line. Unfortunately, though, by this point, he was so exhausted from shooting Disclosure that he began to have second thoughts. It didn’t help that he wasn’t sure he’d have time to commit to the fencing lessons the role would require, and rumours abounded that he was unhappy that Davis’ role had been significantly increased in the rewrites. To Harlin and Carolco’s dismay, Douglas dropped out of the movie, now titled Cutthroat Island.
Naturally, in the wake of Douglas’ departure and the rumours of Davis’ influence on the script, muckraking reports claimed that she had forced her husband into giving her a more prominent role in his picture. Amazingly, though, the week before the movie’s release, Harlin set the record straight to the Los Angeles Times, claiming Davis never even wanted to make the movie in the first place.
“My wife will not talk about this because she doesn’t want to offend anyone in any way, and she doesn’t want anything said misinterpreted,” Harlin cautioned. He claimed Davis was wary about making Cutthroat Island from the start, not because she wasn’t an action star, but because she was worried her star power wouldn’t be enough to carry a mega-budget blockbuster if Douglas wasn’t there to share the burden.
“She said she was scared,” Harlin claimed. “That she couldn’t carry this alone. She would only do it if she had a bigger male star. She would do it if Michael said yes. She wanted it to be a Romancing the Stone.” Stunningly, on the eve of releasing a $90-115 million movie whose success could make or break Carolco, Harlin then admitted, “She never really wanted to do this picture. She wanted to do Mistress of the Seas.”
That movie was an “erotic story about these two women and their escapades with pirates” set up at Columbia Pictures with Basic Instinct’s Paul Verhoeven at the helm. Harlin was approached about jumping ship to that production when Verhoeven dropped out – likely when Davis became interested – but it eventually fell apart, and both of them were left with the consolation prize of Cutthroat Island.
In the end, Davis’ fears about headlining the movie without a proven draw like Douglas at her side were proven depressingly accurate. Cutthroat Island was such a debacle at the box office that it contributed to Carolco going out of business. It also suffered the ignominy of being listed as the biggest flop of all time by the Guinness Book of World Records. In truth, maybe the nervous star should have trusted her instincts and followed Douglas’ walk off the plank.
