Movies - TV
Paul Verhoeven Sunk A Film That Could Have Changed Arnold Schwarzenegger's Career
By JEREMY SMITH
Paul Verhoeven's "Crusade" is one of the most tantalizingly unmade films of the 1990s and it would have starred Arnold Schwarzenegger as Hagen, a medieval serf who ends up fighting on the side of the Muslims in the Holy War. So, why did this $100 million-budgeted epic fall apart?
In an interview with Empire, Schwarzenegger said, "It was all written and ready to go but then Paul started going crazy." The executives asked Verhoeven to guarantee that he wouldn't exceed the $100 million budget, which sounds like a reasonable request, but, for Verhoeven, it was an insult.
Verhoeven's outburst wasn't wholly hubristic because Carolco Pictures had been blowing money like a drunken sailor in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The "Crusade" script had all the makings of a classic, but Carolco ultimately produced Renny Harlin's pirate adventure "Cutthroat Island," which bombed at the box office and led to Carolco's bankruptcy.