Some movies are good. Others are bad. A few sit somewhere in between: ones that demonstrate enormous potential, and that clearly
could have been a great film had something in the production process not stepped in the way and fouled everything up.
The 13th Warrior is definitely this third kind of a film. The short version: in the 1990s author Michael Crichton celebrated enormous commercial success in Hollywood. He had created
ER, which had become the most popular drama on American television. The film adaptation of his science fiction novel
Jurassic Park had become the most successful movie of all time. A string of his other novels all rapidly fell into production, including
Congo, Disclosure, Rising Sun and
Sphere.
At the same time Spanish actor Antonio Banderas had just enjoyed a one-two punch of starring in Robert Rodriguez's
Desperado, which was an acclaimed minor hit, and then Martin Campbell's
The Mask of Zorro, which was an enormous commercial smash. It seemed clear he was the next big action star in Hollywood, and all of the major studios were attempting to line up projects in which he could star.
Then throw in director John McTiernan, who had scored big with
Predator in the 1980s, then re-invented the modern action film with
Die Hard, then adapted Tom Clancy's popular novel
The Hunt for Red October to great success.
At the crossroads of these three 'hot' talents lay Walt Disney Pictures, which owned the motion picture rights to Michael Crichton's novel
Eaters of the Dead. The studio spent deep, and managed to score not just McTiernan to direct but also Banderas to star. It seemed a slam dunk for the summer of 1998.
Of course what actually happened was that Michael Crichton agreed to co-produce the film with John McTiernan, production costs overran wildly, Disney got cold feet over how much money was being invested in the project, test screenings went badly, and Crichton used his clout as Hollywood's golden goose to have McTiernan fired before taking over the production for a series of costly reshoots. The end result, retitled
The 13th Warrior, was delayed from its original release date by more than a year, cost an estimated $160 million dollars to make, release and market, and made less than half of that back in cinemas.
