10 movies that sent legendary directors on a downward spiral

Earning critical acclaim for a movie you’ve made is surely a great boost to your ego. Reading rave reviews about your innovative ideas and skilful direction is certainly enough to give you a decent level of faith in any of your forthcoming ideas. But sometimes, this kind of acclaim blinds filmmakers, leaving them thinking that any old idea – no matter how ambitious – is worthy of our time. Sometimes, it is not.

Many filmmakers have ridden a wave of award wins, illustrious interview opportunities, and rave reviews, only to release something that just doesn’t live up to the standards they’ve set for themselves. In certain cases, filmmakers are able to bounce back onto the cinematic wagon and make something good, proving they weren’t a one-hit wonder – the pressure was just too much.

Sadly, many filmmakers hit a wall and just don’t come back from it. One film leads to a spiral of bad ones, with any of their initial talent disappearing out of the window, never to be seen again. Why this might be doesn’t have a solid answer. Maybe they can’t keep up with new trends and technologies, or maybe they simply had a limited number of ideas that they quickly exhausted.

From John Carpenter to Cameron Crowe, here are ten directors who were once legendary and have now seemingly lost their talents.

10 movies that sent directors on a downward spiral:

10. Rollerball (John McTiernan, 2002)

Between 1987 and 1990, John McTiernan made Predator, Die Hard, and The Hunt for Red October. That’s the kind of generational run that people still rave about more than 30 years later and would have been enough to make any young director think, “Maybe I should quit while I’m ahead?” Thankfully, McTiernan was a braver filmmaker than that, and he went on to also give the world Die Hard with a Vengeance and an awesome The Thomas Crown Affair remake. Then, in the early 2000s, everything went spectacularly pear-shaped, and McTiernan ended up in jail.

This may sound like a flippant way of saying that McTiernan made a bad movie that landed him in “director jail”, like so many other directors have experienced over the years. In McTiernan’s case, though, the tortured production of 2002’s Rollerball saw him clash with producer Charles Roven so badly that he hired a private investigator to illegally wiretap him. When McTiernan subsequently lied to the FBI about it, he was prosecuted and spent 328 days in a South Dakota minimum security penitentiary. Unsurprisingly, he hasn’t directed a film since 2003’s Basic.

9. Snowden (Oliver Stone, 2016)

Oliver Stone has always been one of Hollywood’s greatest provocateurs, with his politically charged films rarely failing to drum up fierce debate. Over the years, he courted controversy with films like JFK and Natural Born Killers, then faced ridicule with Alexander. However, even when one of his films failed to set the box office on fire or didn’t create as many talking points as others, he tended to fly in the face of his detractors by executing a comeback.

In 2016, though, Stone released his last film to date: Snowden. The docudrama told the ripped-from-the-headlines story of the CIA contractor who leaked highly classified NSA documents, forcing him into exile in Moscow. For once, Stone was accused by critics of not committing enough to his usual passionate, in-your-face filmmaking style, and instead of being dismissed as a conspiracy theorist’s dream or a politically shocking provocation, the film was simply deemed boring. He hasn’t directed a feature film since.

8. Strange Days (Kathryn Bigelow, 1995)

In 1991, Kathryn Bigelow released Point Break, one of the best action movies of the ’90s and her biggest hit movie to date. It followed an ascension that started with 1987’s vampire neo-western Near Dark and 1990’s action thriller Blue Steel. Neither of those films pulled up any trees at the box office, but they were well-reviewed and showcased a director with an eye for thrills and spills. Buoyed by the success of Point Break, though, Bigelow was granted an increased budget of $42million for her next film, the sci-fi thriller Strange Days.

Unfortunately for Bigelow, Strange Days split critics and audiences straight down the middle. That kind of divisive film doesn’t often lead to big box office, and the film only recouped $17million. In later years, its reputation has improved immeasurably, though, with many modern critics putting it alongside Blade Runner as one of the best cyberpunk films. Bigelow’s unlucky streak continued with her next two films – The Weight of Water and K:19: The Widowmaker – until she made a heroic comeback with 2008’s The Hurt Locker.

7. Jack (Francis Ford Coppola, 1996)

In 1996, Francis Ford Coppola‘s Jack was released, and the reaction shocked the legendary director. Even though he’d been used to taking slings and arrows from critics over the years and had experienced a few flops, he was taken aback by how much ridicule he was subjected to. Jack starred Robin Williams as a boy with a medical condition that caused him to age four times faster than normal children, and it meant the movie was filled with scenes of Williams in his mid-40s acting like a child. It was lambasted for being ridiculous, schmaltzy, and tedious, and Coppola’s directing career was never quite the same after it.

The year after Jack, Coppola tried to rebound with standard Hollywood potboiler The Rainmaker, and it wasn’t the hit he was expecting, either. He then removed himself from the game, only reemerging in 2007 to make a series of three low-budget indies before returning in 2024 with Megalopolis, which only opened him up to more ridicule. Regarding Jack, the catalyst for his downward spiral, he once said, “Jack was a movie that everybody hated, and I was constantly damned and ridiculed for. I must say I find Jack sweet and amusing…I know I should be ashamed of it, but I’m not. I don’t know why everybody hated it so much.”

6. Ghosts of Mars (John Carpenter, 2001)

John Carpenter‘s long, storied career can be looked at as a series of dizzying climbs and the horrifying downward spirals that followed. After making Assault on Precinct 13, Halloween, The Fog, and Escape From New York between 1976 and 1981, he made The Thing in 1982. These days, it’s seen as one of the greatest sci-fi horror movies ever made, but back then, the middling box office and vitriolic reviews derailed his career significantly.

Carpenter then recovered throughout the rest of the ’80s, peaking again with They Live in 1988. The ’90s saw him slip into a tailspin, though, with the likes of Memoirs of an Invisible Man, Village of the Damned, and Escape From LA all disappointing creatively and financially. By 2001, he realised he was so exhausted and burned out on moviemaking that when everyone in Hollywood predictably lambasted Ghosts of Mars, he decided to call it a day. In the 23 years since its release, Carpenter has only directed once and seems to have no desire to pull himself out of this particular downward spiral anytime soon.

5. The Phantom of the Opera (Dario Argento, 1998)

Italy was one of the main countries that spearheaded the horror genre during the 1960s, making way for a gorier and more gruesome approach. The following decade, Dario Argento arrived as one of the most accomplished giallo filmmakers, making his directorial debut with The Bird with the Crystal Plumage in 1970. He followed it up with other heralded movies, like Deep Red, Suspiria, Inferno, and Tenebrae.

While these movies cemented him as one of the most acclaimed Italian directors of all time, Argento’s career took a downturn in the 1990s, although it is hard to pinpoint exactly when he started to lose his brilliance. The Phantom of the Opera, released in 1998, was a pretty low point for Argento, though, which critics widely panned. Since then, movies like The Card Player, The Mother of Tears, Giallo, and Dracula 3D have all led Argento’s directorial career towards a disappointing finish.

4. North (Rob Reiner, 1994)

In the 1980s, Rob Reiner was responsible for many successful movies that have endured over the years and are held dearly by many as beloved classics. From This Is Spinal Tap to Stand By Me, The Princess Bride, and When Harry Met Sally…, Reiner made many charming movies that blended comedy and drama, rich with emotion and complexity. He even made Misery and A Few Good Men, but in 1994, he managed to make a movie so diabolically bad that critics questioned how Reiner even ended up there.

North is labelled as one of the worst movies of all time, and despite its stacked cast, including Bruce Willis, Kathy Bates, Alan Arkin, and a young Elijah Wood, it only grossed $12million, losing around $28m. Since then, most of Reiner’s films, besides a few good ones like The American President, have been forgettable. From Rumor Has It… to Shock and Awe, North was a sign that Reiner should’ve stopped directing after A Few Good Men.

3. Donnie Darko (Richard Kelly, 2000)

Donnie Darko is a cult classic, loved by many and described by critics as a fascinating and influential movie. How come, then, Richard Kelly hasn’t been able to make a good movie since? Despite the brilliance of Donnie Darko, Kelly’s directorial debut, he has only made two movies since it was released back in 2000, both of which have been received poorly.

Neither Southland Tales or The Box were acclaimed, with critics writing negative reviews about both. His attempts at screenwriting weren’t much better either, with Kelly penning Domino for Tony Scott, which was widely panned. The Box was released in 2009, and since then, he has tried to write a few more movies which have simply never come to fruition. It appears that Kelly is a one-hit wonder of the movie world.

2. Elizabethtown (Cameron Crowe, 2005)

After starting out his career as a music journalist, Cameron Crowe began writing movies, with his first credit being the classic teen movie Fast Times At Ridgemont High. It wasn’t long before Crowe got in the director’s chair himself, helming classic titles like Say Anything, Jerry Maguire, and Almost Famous, the latter of which received an Oscar for ‘Best Original Screenplay’. As a filmmaker, Crowe was well-regarded, but after a mixed reception from Vanilla Sky, Crowe slipped into a spiral of terrible movies.

He directed Elizabethtown, released in 2005, which marked the first terrible movie he made. It spawned the creation of the term ‘Manic Pixie Dream Girl’ by critic Nathan Rabin because the female lead was that one-dimensional, and Orlando Bloom later regretted appearing in it. More forgettable films followed, including Aloha, which was criticised for whitewashing one of its characters.

1. Cop Out (Kevin Smith, 2010)

While Kevin Smith was never touted as the next Stanley Kubrick, the filmmaker gained a cult following in the 1990s with movies like Mallrats, Clerks, and Chasing Amy. As one half of Jay and Silent Bob, he has gained attention as a comedic actor alongside being a filmmaker, defining the ‘90s indie cinema scene with his slacker humour.

In the 2000s, he found relative success with Clerks II and Zack and Miri Make a Porno, but it all went downhill fast. He became a director-for-hire, creating Cop Out in 2010, which bombed. The buddy cop film was a sign that Smith seemed to have well and truly lost his spark. While he found niche success with Tusk in 2014, everything else he has done has been pretty bad.

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