The Worst-Rated Movies From Legendary Directors
Can you genuinely even be a legendary director without at least one initially hated/critically misunderstood/financial disaster in your filmography?
It’s a worthwhile question to ask, especially given the release of Ridley Scott’s The Dog Stars , which is looking set to lose upwards of $100M at the box-office off the back of a tough 40% score on Rotten Tomatoes.
Only time will tell if Scott's latest will do a Blade Runner and be reclaimed as a modern classic (don't bet the house on it), but for now it joins the murderers' row of major flops by legendary directors, of which there have been more than a few over the years. The bigger a filmmaker’s name gets, after all, the bigger the budgets that come their way, and so the bigger the risk of catastrophe.
But real ones know that the flops can sometimes be the most interesting films to explore, especially when it’s a case of taking too big a swing. In the list below, you’ll find eight examples of when legendary directors failed with audiences and critics, but I would very much recommend watching each and every one of them.
If you’re reading this article, you're probably already well aware of Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis, a movie that can rightly claim to be the most ambitious and hubristic of the decade, which is also why — in spite of some glaring faults — it’s also one of the most interesting.
The Godfather director had wanted to make a movie about a utopian architect in a city called New Rome since the 1970s, but it took him almost a half a century and the sale of a number of his own vineyards before the Hollywood legend was able to get it off the ground. The resulting movie, with its bizarre script, janky CGI, and stiff performances, baffled most viewers and definitely didn’t make Coppola his money back, but it definitely has its diehard defenders (despite a 46% critic score on Rotten Tomatoes, and an even worse 34% audience rating).
Whichever side of that you end up being on, it definitely deserves a watch — as does Coppola's 1982 musical One From the Heart, a financial catastrophe that pretty destroyed American Zoetrope, the independent studio he founded.
Even Quentin Tarantino himself, who's always been obsessive when it comes to his legacy and filmography, admitted to somewhat regretting making Death Proof — which is a bit of a shame, because it’s a pretty good time at the movies and that climactic car chase is as good as any action scene he's directed.
The movie, which was originally released as one half of a double bill called Grindhouse, alongside Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror, was a nostalgic homage to exploitation movies of the 1970s, just as Kill Bill had been to kung fu movies and Inglourious Basterds had been to classic war flicks.
It’s legacy is as a bit of an outlier in the Tarantino canon for sure, but it’s a far far better film than its $30m box-office returns suggested.
Whatever you say about Scorsese (and the rest of the industry) being a little too deep in his cocaine era when he sat down to direct New York, New York, even the movie's biggest defenders will probably admit its a little messy, but it’s a mess created on the back of great performances, high-end Hollywood craft work, and classic tunes.
The movie was set to be Scorsese’s homage to the Hollywood musical, much in the same way that Raging Bull had been his sports movie and GoodFellas would later be his crime epic, but audiences at the time didn’t quite know what to make of the Mean Streets director trying his hand at a famously romantic genre.
It has, of course, outlived those early criticisms and is now considered a low key classic — thanks in no small part to Liza Minnelli’s electric performance. But, it still has a lowly 58% score on Rotten Tomatoes.
Clint Eastwood’s The 15:17 to Paris is easily the strangest movie in the director's career, but I'd argue it’s nowhere close to being the worst — and, perhaps accidentally, and depending on how you measure these things, it’s also one of the most experimental studio-produced movies you'll see, certainly of the subset that are directed by octogenarians.
The story goes that the Hollywood icon had been so inspired by the story of a group of U.S. marines who foiled a terrorist attack on a train through middle Europe while on leave from base in 2015 that he decided to not only make a movie about it but to ask the marines to play themselves.
Don’t go in expecting a masterclass in subtlety, but the uncanny effect of seeing these guys recreate such an intense moment from their own recent lives is too strange and interesting an idea to fully disregard.
Whether he’s adapting a best selling novel (Fight Club, Gone Girl, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo) or offering a revisionist history of a Hollywood legend (Mank), David Fincher’s movies usually feel as self-contained and intricately designed as a pocket watch.
The only real exception to that in his filmography (at least before Cliff Booth) is his debut, Alien³ — a film which took the impeccable franchise groundwork that'd been laid by Ridley Scott and James Cameron and reshaped it into a more grungy kind of horror that even Fincher's most dedicated fans still don’t quite know what to make of.
The film had a notoriously troubled production, in which a number of more interesting ideas were suggested before the studio landed on a prison-set instalment that looked rough on first watch and has yet to get better with age. But hey, there’s always time...
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Many tried and failed to make an adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune before David Lynch gave it a stab — at which point basically everyone in Hollywood agreed that Herbert's book could not be contained in a single movie and essentially gave up trying for the next 40 years.
Lynch got the gig on the back of his success with The Elephant Man, and even though the film more than delivered in terms of costume and set design, it's more or less gone down as the only real blot on the legendary director’s resume and has a disappointing 36% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
After making his name as a red hot screenwriter thanks to Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, and off the back of his enormously successful and influential directorial debut, American Gigolo, Paul Schrader was able to spend the next two decades making wonderfully idiosyncratic and provocative movies that rarely, if ever, turned much of a profit.
That all changed at the end of the ‘90s with the back-to-back commercial failures of Forever Mine, Auto Focus and Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist — the last of which has gone down as one of the most famously botched productions of the ‘00s and a major financial catastrophe.
And yet, like any Schrader picture, it is still worth seeing.
Since the advent of Twitter, the time it takes for a movie to go from flop to critical reassessment has only gotten shorter and shorter, to the point that a sub-section of online movie fans will now be more than happy to tell you that Damien Chazelle’s best films are in fact not Whiplash and La La Land but First Man and Babylon.
The last of those, Babylon, is a movie about the early, excessive days of Hollywood — which kind of made the movie's mix of scale, ambition and subsequent box-office failure feel cosmically on point.
With those back-to-back disappointments, audiences have now only been able to enjoy one new Damien Chazelle movie in the last eight years, which is kind of shocking, and we’ll probably have to wait another couple before we get to see the next one.
We’ll be first in line.
