For fans of flailing films it is the news they've dreaded to hear - Swept Away, Madonna's latest movie, will not be released in cinemas in the UK.

Since its release in the United States last month, the film has been derided and scorned by critics and audiences respectively. Variety denounced it as "painless and turgid" and the Washington Post warned: "It's as awful as you've heard and as bad as you've imagined." Audiences imagined the worst and it earned just over £200,000 in its opening weekend.

Red Dragon, The Silence of the Lambs prequel which opened in the US the previous week, made £24m. Critics gleefully predicted that Swept Away would be a huge winner of "Razzie" awards, the anti-Oscars of Hollywood.

The movie, a remake of Lina Wertmuller's original film, stars Madonna as a wealthy yacht-bound wife who becomes stranded on an island with her Italian deckhand. It is directed by Madonna's British husband, Guy Ritchie, more famous for films about gangsters, such as Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, than tales of desert island passion.

This marks the second time for Madonna that a cinema collaboration with a husband has proved a disappointment. The 1985 movie Shanghai Surprise, in which she co-starred with her husband at the time, Sean Penn, was a flop.

Swept Away, which cost £7m to make, was scheduled to be released in Britain next March. It is rare for a studio to pull a film completely from a planned release, particularly one with such a well-known cast member. Even Glitter, another recent critically panned film starring a pop star - this time Mariah Carey - was released in Britain. That Swept Away is pointedly not being released in the UK will be even more of an embarrassment for the couple, who live here.

Columbia Tristar declined to comment yesterday about their decision.