The $100 million box office flop that single-handedly bankrupted a legendary Hollywood studio

An A-list cast and a massive budget are no guarantee of box office success. Even films anticipated to be blockbusters can catastrophically flop, taking entire Hollywood studios down with them. 

That was the fate of the 1995 adventure movie Cutthroat Island, which earned a spot in the Guinness World Records as the biggest box office bomb of all time after losing over $100 million, bankrupting its studio, Carolco Pictures.

Directed by Renny Harlin, the high-seas adventure starred his then-wife Geena Davis as a fierce pirate hunting for buried treasure with one-third of a cryptic map inherited from her late father. Matthew Modine and Frank Langella co-starred in the pirate adventure film. 

Why was Cutthroat Island the biggest box office flop?

With estimated production costs of $98 million (£63 million) and a US domestic gross of $10,017,322 (£6,411,086), the film left production company Carolco Pictures with a net loss of $104,982,678 (£67,188,914), or $146,947,958 (£90,319,369) when adjusted for inflation.

The production itself had one disaster after another: Michael Douglas left the project months before filming began, sets caught fire, leading to production suspension.

A month before the film's release in November 1995, Carolco Pictures filed for bankruptcy. Its assets were sold at auction in 1996.

The studio had previously enjoyed huge success in the 80s and 90s with the Rambo franchise, Field of Dreams, Total Recall, Terminator 2: Judgment Day and Basic Instinct.

Critical response 

The film was also met with poor reviews. 

Empire handed out two stars, describing the film as "mindless entertainment, but its critical and commercial failure doomed the pirate genre to a watery grave," while Variety said the film "strenuously but vainly attempts to revive the thrills of old-fashioned pirate pictures". 

Matthew Modine addressed the impact of the harsh critical response, revealing that the reviews hurt him. "I'm not going to lie. I didn't want to kill myself, [but] I wanted to hang myself in the bathroom so that when the cleaning lady came in to do the room, that she'd find me and say, 'Oh my God!' and call," he told Entertainment Weekly in 2016. 

"Because I wanted people to know how much that hurt — that I did the very best that I could on the film, as did everybody that was working on the film."