The studio-killing flop that torpedoed an Arnold Schwarzenegger epic
Ever since 1985, there’s been a clamour to see Arnold Schwarzenegger pick up a hefty broadsword and lay waste to an entire army. However, the long-mooted King Conan isn’t the only potential movie floated with which to make it happen.
After breaking out with Conan the Barbarian and following it up with Conan the Destroyer, playing thinly-veiled facsimile Lord Kalidor in Red Sonja stands out as the biggest regret of the action icon’s career and the one project in his filmography that he despises more than any other. Still, that wasn’t enough to swear him off the genre for good, even if one of the biggest box office bombs in history permanently ended any hopes of seeing it happen.
Having already worked magic on Total Recall – and with his stock higher than ever following the success of Basic Instinct – Paul Verhoeven was set to re-team with the ‘Austrian Oak’ on Crusade, a massive historical war epic set in the late 11th century. The downside is that it was going to cost $100million and carry an R-rating, but the prospect of Schwarzenegger and Verhoeven taking their talents deep into the past was as enticing as it gets.
Unfortunately, production company Carolco Pictures was already facing financial difficulties, forcing them into the position of funding either Crusade or Cutthroat Island. Ironically, Verhoeven was offered the chance to direct the latter, but he told Variety his passion project was always going to take precedence.
“At one point, they even asked me if I was interested in Cutthroat Island, but I really wanted to work with Arnold again after Total Recall,” he explained. “Our idea was to make this movie where Arnold becomes the king of Jerusalem. At the end, he abandons all of that to live with his girlfriend and settles in a little farm.”
Continuing, Verhoeven lamented that the executives made the worst possible decision in what was a 50/50 situation. “They were working on two movies at the same time. One was Crusade, and the other was Cutthroat Island, and then they found out that they only had $100million or something like that and both movies cost that much,” he said. “So they chose the pirate movie, which was, in retrospect, a terrible choice because Cutthroat Island tanked completely and led to the bankruptcy of Carolco.”
It was a risky gambit that ended up backfiring spectacularly after Cutthroat Island set a brand new world record for the most money ever lost by a single film in the history of cinema, earning back a little over 10% of its production costs from cinemas and sending Carolco spiralling straight down the drain and into the throes of bankruptcy and ultimately closure.
As for Crusade, it was never picked up by another studio despite the talent involved and remains the most enticing feature that Schwarzenegger never made.
