11 MORE Movies That Led To Other Movies Being Cancelled (And Why)
5. Cutthroat Island Bankrupts Carolco And Cans Arnie's Crusade
Cutthroat Island will live forever in infamy as one of the biggest box office bombs that Hollywood has ever seen after earning just $10m worldwide on a budget of $98m. The disastrous swashbuckler only accelerated the demise of studio Carolco, who ended up filing for bankruptcy a month before the movie was even released.
Carolco's financial woes had already seen them cancel another expensive production, but this one boasted the reunion of Total Recall duo Arnold Schwarzenegger and Paul Verhoeven to tackle an action-packed historical epic that already had sets built and ready to go, with Robert Duvall, Jennifer Connelly, John Turturro and Charlton Heston all set to lend support to the Austrian Oak.
Crusade was pitched as 'Spartacus meets Conan', and along with the standard epic battles Verhoeven wouldn't have shied away from the more controversial and subversive aspect of a story heavily rooted in religious warfare. Instead, Carolco opted to funnel their money into Cutthroat Island because they thought it would be the cheaper option, which only ended up backfiring spectacularly as costs ballooned and the studio collapsed as a direct result.