01/96. MATHEW MODINE AND GEENA DAVIS STAR IN THE NEW MGM RELEASE “CUTTHROAT ISLAND.”
In a normal world, Wonder Woman 1984 would have opened theatrically worldwide this past June and once again debunked conventional wisdom about what kind of movies make money. Even after years of blockbusters like Twilight, Mamma Mia, Alice in Wonderland, The Hunger Games, Frozen, Lucy, The Force Awakens, Hidden Figures, Wonder Woman, Ocean’s 8 and Captain Marvel, there still exists an implicit presumption that every big “female-led” movie is yet another zero-sum test for the box office bankability of movies for/from/featuring women. Wonder Woman 1984 will open theatrically and on HBO Max on Christmas Day, costing it any number of likely box office records.
In a skewed irony, today is the 25th anniversary of Cutthroat Island, which is “responsible” for much of that conventional wisdom. It grossed $10 million worldwide on a $100 million budget, becoming one of the biggest box office bombs (especially when adjusted for inflation) of all time. It’s now streaming on Amazon Prime, and a recent rewatch confirms what I felt about the picture on December 22, 1995. It’s no masterpiece or action classic, but it’s a huge-scaled, impressively practical and unpretentious bit of over-the-top Hollywood junk food. The whole thing plays like a sloppy first draft for both Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl and The Mummy.
Carolco Pictures was already on the edge of bankruptcy before this film opened to mostly empty theaters. For that matter, MGM, the film’s distributor, was in the process of being sold (time is a flat circle) and thus failed to provide much of a marketing campaign. Ironically, Carolco went with this picture instead of the pricier (but likely more commercial) Crusade, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and directed by Paul Verhoeven, only to see this film soar over-budget. The budget issues allegedly came about partially because director Renny Harlin was distracted by finding a male lead who would play second-fiddle to a female action hero.
Michael Douglas wanted equal time while Tom Cruise, Keanu Reeves, Daniel Day-Lewis and pretty much every white male actor of that era allegedly said no. By the time Harlin could turn his attention to production design, he hated what he saw, thus necessitating a revamp of the sets in a brief time. Yes, the challenges of finding a male lead were in the news at the time, before Matthew Modine (a fine actor but not precisely a butts-in-the-seats draw) said yes. Comparatively, Chris Pine seems to relish playing second-fiddle in the films like Wonder Woman, A Wrinkle in Time and Into the Woods.
What stood out then and stands out now about Cutthroat Island is its total lack of pretension. Even with the A-level budget, it’s an unapologetic B movie. It’s noticeably less naval-gazing and ponderous than Kevin Reynolds and Kevin Costner’s Waterworld, another insanely over-budget action fantasy from 1995 that stood out for its old-school “build the giant sets and do the ridiculous stunts” showmanship. Yes, there’s too much slow-motion for many of these action beats. However, you can damn well see what’s going on at all times. I liked the sheer scale of the thing and how it was just a goofy action spectacular that just happened to feature a female in the lead role.
Yes, there are a few too many “Hey, it’s a woman doing the thing!” bits, but it’s also lovely that Davis’ Captain Morgan doesn’t have to soften up or learn to be more like a lady to win the day. She’s a scoundrel through and through, while Langella’s Dawg Brown is worse and willing to team with the British government. Like the Pirates of the Caribbean sequels, it makes no bones about who the real bad guys are. The film doesn’t try to make any aggressive political points, even as it subtly argues for how class inequities create the perception of heroism and villainy.
Renny Harlin offers a fair share of hack-and-slash action. The first piece of the treasure map is tattooed on a man’s (quickly removed) scalp. The movie isn’t remotely as bloody and cruel as Die Hard 2 or Cliffhanger, but it’s violent enough to make kids think they were getting away with something back when the PG-13 meant something. The third-act showdown is impressively staged and impressively long, with a healthy dose of sword fights, ship-to-ship combat and a role reversal whereby the woman has to rescue the dude-in-distress. That also applies to a second-act beat where Morgan is injured in battle, and the Modine’s William Shaw has to fix her up.
Absent the expectations of its budget or the undue pressure put on the very idea of a female-led action flick, Cutthroat Island is good fun for the whole family (my kids, aged five to thirteen, enjoyed it too) and a relic from a time when movies like this weren’t expected to start a franchise. However, it’s understandable why it bombed back in the day. Geena Davis was/is a respected Oscar-winning actress, but she wasn’t an “opener,” while Modine certainly wasn’t as big of a draw as any number of the actors who turned the role down. Would Michael Douglas, in the love interest/co-star role, made a difference?
Maybe, and it’s not like Douglas wasn’t making a mini-career out of being upstaged by women (Fatal Attraction, Basic Instinct, Disclosure) at the time. Nonetheless, pirate movies were considered box office poison right until critics got their first look at Curse of the Black Pearl 7.5-years later. Mostly negative reviews (Ebert was an exception) didn’t help, nor did an unusually crowded Christmas season. In terms of competition, it went up against (deep breath) Toy Story, Jumanji, Grumpier Old Men, Heat, Father of the Bride part II, Sabrina, Sudden Death, Tom & Huck, Dracula Dead and Loving It and Nixon. It grossed just $2.3 million over the Fri-Sun frame.
You can trace its failure to the whole “women can’t open big action movies” mentality. But here’s the rub: The number one movie that Christmas was Forrest Whitaker’s adaptation of Terry McMillan’s Waiting to Exhale, which earned $14.13 million for an eventual $67 million domestic cume. That romantic melodrama starred Angela Bassett, Whitney Houston, Loretta Devine and Lela Rochon and was precisely the kind of film that “surprises” the pundits when it over-performs theatrically. While Cutthroat Island put a considerable dent in the notion of women headlining action movies, it’s not like the success of Waiting to Exhale led to a slew of like-minded (and demographically-targeted) flicks. Conventional wisdom always wins.
Cutthroat Island is one of a handful of “big” female-led offerings over the last 25 years (see also: Charlize Theron’s Aeon Flux) that failed for understandable reasons but were nonetheless used to designate an entire gender as box office poison no matter the many exceptions to the rule. Wonder Woman 1984 was supposed to the final word on this, a female-led action spectacular that was EXPECTED to be the biggest movie of the year (at least domestically). Patty Jenkins’ superhero sequel’s complicated and compromised release is a grim irony considering how much conventional wisdom Wonder Woman had to debunk. Cutthroat Island walked so Wonder Woman could run.
