Cutthroat Box Office

I have been thinking a lot about Pirates lately - mostly due to the board game Merchants and Marauders which came out recently. I got a copy the other week and have played it a few times - it's probably the best pirate themed board game I've ever played (not too hard - most of them aren't good), but more amusingly, the game is near-identical to thoughts I had on the subject. I wasn't actively working on such a game, but I have a notebook full of thoughts about it, and Merchants and Marauders does everything I wanted to do.

Anyway, in thinking about that game, the other day I went to YouTube and listened to some piratey music - themes and scores from pirate movies such as Pirates of the Caribbean, and an old favorite - Cutthroat Island. this reminded me of that movie, and how it was the biggest flop in motion picture history. I never understood why that movie bombed so badly - tanking the production company, Geena Davis' career, and Hollywood's willingness to create pirate themed movies altogether for almost a decade. A little poor acting/accents notwithstanding, the movie had everything a great adventure fan could ask for - rousing sword fights, narrow escapes, family feuds, adventure, excitement, and pirate treasure.

There are lots of movies out there with bad acting and bad accents (see the first several Harry Potter movies) which haven't put people out of business, so how did this particular movie flop so spectacularly?

I don't know, but in thinking about it I realized that I don't have the DVD in my collection, and I'd like to. For such a "terrible" movie, it's surprisingly hard to find a copy of the DVD - you'd think it would be on the racks at Bookman's or something.

EDIT: I called Bookman's on Monday and they told me they did not have Cutthroat Island in stock. I stopped in yesterday, and found that they had 2 copies on the shelf. So unless they took in 2 copies of the movie and got them organized and on the shelf in about 20 hours, then someone didn't know what they were talking about.

The good news is that I now have the movie, and will likely watch it tonight.