Production notes

In autumn 1994, producer Kevin Loader bought a copy of Captain Corelli's Mandolin by Louis de Bernières, and was immediately interested in adapting it to film. The British Loader and director Roger Michell did not think a $25 million production would be financed in the United Kingdom, and after sending the script to the US believed that Hollywood studios and agencies did not understand the novel. According to Loader, these groups were "put off by large sections of the novel concerning Mussolini, a cat and chapters called L'Omosessuale." The two then decided to go to Working Title Films on the basis that it was a European production company, a proposition accepted by executive Tim Bevan. As Cage was not a musician, he learned how to play a mandolin for the role. In every scene in which Corelli plays the instrument, Cage was actually playing the mandolin. According to de Bernières, Cage was in a bad mood throughout filming due to going through a divorce with his then-wife Patricia Arquette, and would fly back to California every week.

The film grossed $13.8 million in the United Kingdom. The film opened at number six at the US box office, taking in $7,209,345 in its opening weekend and went on to gross $25,543,895 in the United States and Canada. It grossed an additional $22.8 million internationally for a total of $62,112,895 worldwide against a cost of $57 million.

On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 28% based on reviews from 118 critics, with an average rating of 4.5/10. The website's critical consensus reads: "The cinematography is gorgeous, but the movie plays it fast and loose with history and the novel it was adapted from. Mostly, the movie fails because the romance between the leads strains credulity and the story is largely uninvolving." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 36 out of 100, based on reviews from 33 critics, indicating "generally unfavorable" reviews. Derek Elley of Variety praised the beautiful on-location shoot, but was critical of the film and wrote that it "Strikes too many false notes on the dramatic side to add up to a satisfying emotional experience." Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film 2 out of 4, and suggested the film might have worked better with subtitles, pointing out the absurdity of one scene "where something is said in English pronounced with one accent, and a character asks, What did he say? and he is told -- in English pronounced with another accent."