The greatest movies never made: Paul Verhoeven’s ‘Crusade’
After making the jump to Hollywood in the late 1980s, Paul Verhoeven wasted little time in establishing himself as one of the biggest, boldest, and most provocative blockbuster directors to come along in a long time. However, Crusade proved a bridge too far.
RoboCop, Total Recall, and Basic Instinct were all massive hits that injected the familiar action, sci-fi, and erotic thriller genres with new stylistic quirks and subversive sensibilities. Even then, the filmmaker’s next project was set to be his most ambitious undertaking yet.
Having already collaborated on one of the most expensive productions in history when Total Recall put its expansive Martian setting and cutting-edge effects to phenomenal use, Verhoeven and Arnold Schwarzenegger were poised to re-team on the $100million, R-rated historical epic. Pre-production began in 1993, with the ensemble poised to see the ‘Austrian Oak’ joined by Jennifer Connelly, John Turturro, Robert Duvall, Gary Sinise, and Charlton Heston. Sets had been built on location in Spain, and Verhoeven was moving ahead at full speed, only for the plug to be pulled entirely.
Schwarzenegger would have played peasant thief Hagen, who stages a fake miracle in order to escape the hangman’s noose. Heston’s Pope Urban II would have then used the petty criminal as a propaganda tool, conscripting him into the army as Christian forces sought to conquer the Middle East.
Sinise’s villainous Count Emmich would be revealed as Hagen’s half-brother, who makes it his mission to eliminate his sibling at any cost. However, when Hagen is sold into slavery as part of the scheme to prevent his meteoric rise up the ranks, he meets Connelly’s Leila and begins fighting against his former employers to defend the Saracens.
Crusade was going to be as controversial as Verhoeven’s approach to that period in history would suggest, after he’d described his vision as being “the story of the Crusades is the murderous attack of the Christians on the Arabs and Jews”. Heston’s casting alone would have made that perfectly clear, given the actor’s famous performances in the likes of The Ten Commandments and El Cid.
The screenplay was loaded with pointed political barbs that resonated in the modern climate just as they did in the time period Crusade was set, while there were also the requisite massive-scale battles, beheadings aplenty, graphic scenes of violence and mutilation, cannibalism, and of course wanton eroticism. Essentially, imagine the bastard child of Spartacus and Conan the Barbarian with a colossal budget, shot through with Verhoeven’s unmistakable visual and thematic motifs.
In the end, it was Cutthroat Island that served as the straw that broke Crusade‘s back for good. Production company Carolco opted to spend its dwindling financial resources on the swashbuckling disaster that would end up losing more money than any single motion picture had ever lost before.
Verhoeven was forced to permanently shelve his passion project as a result, but had it been made, it would have been released prior to Braveheart recapturing Academy Awards glory for the historical epic and well before Ridley Scott’s Gladiator ignited its boom period. Crusade would have married the old-fashioned epic modern technology and pointed themes to deliver a sword-swinging spectacular like no other, although Verhoeven’s combative nature didn’t help matters when it came to fighting his corner.
“I kept kicking him under the table and trying to tell him to shut up while we’re ahead. But he just wouldn’t, and that was it. That was the end of that movie,” Schwarzenegger said to Empire of the fateful meeting where the plug was officially pulled. “Paul always tried to be honest, but you can be a little bit selective about when to be honest and when to just move on with the project. It was a shame.”
