Updated June 15, 2019 3.6K votes 814 voters 31.5K views
Voting Rules
Vote up the most surprising crappy movie made by an iconic and respected film director.
Sometimes a director has an instantly recognizable style like David Fincher, Steven Spielberg or Ridley Scott. But what if we told you that one of the worst films ever made (Alien 3) was the work of one of the most acclaimed directors or all time? Or that Steven Spielberg made a barely watchable film starring a young Justin Chatwin and Tom Cruise? How about a two hour Ridley Scott melodrama starring Russell Crowe about wine and... growing up? (It's real and it's awful!) Turns out there are plenty of bad movies directed by great directors, proving that no one is perfect.
There are also acclaimed film directors who pride themselves on being diverse and experimenting, but still maintain an incredible body of work. You've got your Coen Brothers, Scorseses, David O. Russells, and Robert Zemekises. Don't worry; they've all had their follies as well and they each make appearances on this list.
This is a list of movies that remind you that even the absolute best director can make an awful movie. These are the movies some of these directors wish were stricken from the record (one of the films on this list was, in fact, released under a pseudonym and with a different title). These are the surprising movies directed by Hollywood's iconic directors!
His early career is the stuff of legend (The Sixth Sense, Signs, Unbreakable), but then something happened and nothing he's made has been remotely watchable since (The Last Airbender, The Happening, After Earth).
Love him or hate him, the ever political, ever polarizing Oliver Stone has made some groundbreaking films: Platoon, Wall Street, JFK, and Tom Cruise's fantastic Born on the Fourth of July. But then there are the two movies we bet he wishes he had avoided altogether (they're oddly his least obviously political films). There was the shockingly bad Alexander, and the sequel nobody asked for: Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.
David O. Russell impressed people early in his career with Three Kings. Then he came back with a vengeance releasing The Fighter, Silver Linings Playbook, and American Hustle back to back to back. But even with all of his Oscar clout he couldn't stop the film he abandoned before making The Fighter from being released under a different title and a directorial pseudonym. Accidental Love stars Jake Gyllenhaal, James Marsden, and Jessica Biel and even with that cast, it's painful.
The Coen Brothers are a rare talent, masters of both comedy (Fargo, Big Lebowski, O Brother Where Art Thou) and drama (No Country for Old Men, Blood Simple, Barton Fink). They've really only had a few films that weren't astounding: the failed rom-com attempt Intolerable Cruelty and the surprisingly lackluster Tom Hanks vehicle The Ladykillers.
Mad Max, The Road Warrior, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome and Mad Max: Fury Road made a bunch of kids movies (as well as The Witches of Eastwick)!It's not necessarily a bad thing, nor are the films entirely awful (though they are certainly surprising). The guy who thought up Mad Max directed Babe: Pig in the City along with the Happy Feet films.
Woody Allen makes a movie a year, so they can't all be legendary, but many of them are. Films like Annie Hall, Manhattan, Hannah and Her Sisters, and others keep people excited that for a new Allen film every year. On the flip side, there is the occasional movie like Scoop or Cassandra's Dream which even Ewan McGregor, Tom Wilkinson, and Colin Farrell couldn't save.
