Every filmmaker with a long enough résumé eventually hits a rough patch. It happens to the greats too, the directors whose names alone sell tickets and whose earlier work sits comfortably in film school syllabi. What makes these particular missteps interesting isn’t just that they flopped. It’s how completely they clashed with everything we thought we knew about the person behind the camera.
Some of these films bombed at the box office. Others made money but got torn apart by critics anyway. A few have quietly found cult followings decades later. Here’s a look at six respected directors and the one movie that made audiences do a double take at the credits.
Steven Spielberg and the WWII comedy nobody asked for
By 1979, Spielberg had already given the world Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and it genuinely felt like he could not miss. Then came 1941, a sprawling war comedy about panic on the California coast following Pearl Harbor. Coming off the extraordinary back-to-back-to-back success of Duel, Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, 1941 was a distinct change of pace for Spielberg, giving him carte blanche to bring the shenanigans-heavy screenplay to life. The result, unfortunately, landed with a thud among critics.
Rotten Tomatoes summarizes the critical consensus as Spielberg’s attempt at screwball comedy collapsing under a glut of ideas, confusing an unwieldy scope for a commensurate amount of guffaws. It wasn’t the financial disaster its reputation suggests, though. The film received mixed reviews and was not as financially successful as many of Spielberg’s other films, but was still a moderate box office success, grossing $94.9 million against a $35 million budget. It’s since received belated popularity after an expanded version aired on ABC in the 1980s, with subsequent television broadcasts and home video reissues, raising it to cult status.
Francis Ford Coppola and the body-swap dramedy that baffled everyone
The man behind The Godfather and Apocalypse Now made a movie in 1996 about a ten-year-old boy who ages four times faster than normal, played by an adult Robin Williams. Jack is a 1996 American coming-of-age comedy-drama film co-produced and directed by Francis Ford Coppola. The premise alone raised eyebrows, and the execution didn’t win anyone over either.
The film received negative reviews from critics, with praise of Williams’ performance but criticism for its screenplay, and it became a box-office bomb, grossing $78 million against its $45 million budget. The critical consensus on Rotten Tomatoes put it plainly, describing Robin Williams’ childlike energy channeled in all the wrong places with Jack, a bizarre tragedy that aims for uplift but sinks deep into queasy schmaltz. Coppola himself never fully backed down from defending it, later saying he found Jack sweet and amusing and didn’t dislike it as much as everyone else seemed to.
Oliver Stone and the three-hour Alexander the Great epic
Oliver Stone spent years chasing a passion project about Alexander the Great, and when Alexander finally arrived in 2004 starring Colin Farrell, it turned into one of the more notorious historical epics of its decade. After release, while it performed well in Europe, the American critical reaction was negative, and the film grossed over $167 million worldwide against a $155 million budget, becoming a box-office bomb. That gap between European reception and American reviews became one of the more talked-about quirks of the film’s rollout.
The numbers on Rotten Tomatoes tell their own story. The film holds an approval rating of just 15 percent based on 201 reviews, with critics summarizing it as a ponderous, talky, and emotionally distant biopic that fails to illuminate Alexander’s life. Audiences weren’t much kinder either, as CinemaScore polling gave the film an average grade of D+ on an A+ to F scale. Stone never really let it go, releasing multiple recut versions over the following decade in an attempt to fix what audiences rejected the first time around.
Clint Eastwood and the real heroes playing themselves
By the time Clint Eastwood made The 15:17 to Paris in 2018, he’d already directed Unforgiven, Mystic River, and Million Dollar Baby. For this one, based on a real 2015 train attack, he made an unusual choice: casting the actual men who stopped the attacker as themselves rather than hiring professional actors. The film is unique in that it actually stars the real-life people on which it’s based, the three Americans who stopped a terrorist attack aboard an Amsterdam train bound for Paris.
The gamble did not pay off with critics. The film landed at a 24 percent fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with a Metacritic score of 48. One especially memorable pan described it as a strangely boring, dramatically inert film in which the main characters remain as opaque and unreadable as sphinxes to the very last. It remains, by most measures, the lowest-rated movie Clint Eastwood has directed based on Rotten Tomatoes.
Tim Burton and the divisive Planet of the Apes remake
Tim Burton built his reputation on gothic whimsy, from Edward Scissorhands to Beetlejuice, so his 2001 stab at rebooting Planet of the Apes felt like an odd fit from the start. The film made money, no question, with a box office take of $362.2 million against a $100 million budget. Critically, though, it split opinion right down the middle.
The critics’ consensus noted that this remake couldn’t compare to the original in some critics’ minds, though its striking visuals and B-movie charms might win some viewers over. One reviewer summed up the disconnect bluntly, writing that Burton’s singular vision is missing from this mishmash of a remake, part sci-fi, part adventure, part ape-human romance, but unsatisfying on any level. Audiences were even less forgiving than critics, with the film sitting at only 27 percent from its viewers, the bottom of the barrel for a Burton film with audiences.
Ridley Scott and the epic that stumbled on its own casting
Ridley Scott has built one of the most respected filmographies in modern cinema, from Alien to Blade Runner to Gladiator. His 2014 biblical epic Exodus: Gods and Kings, however, arrived to a wave of criticism that had little to do with spectacle and everything to do with judgment calls behind the scenes. Casting predominantly white actors, including Christian Bale, in lead roles set in ancient Egypt drew sharp backlash well before the film even opened, and that controversy overshadowed most conversations about the movie itself.
Reviews on release were largely unkind, criticizing the film’s bloated runtime, muddled pacing, and heavy reliance on digital effects to carry sequences that felt hollow rather than awe inspiring. It underperformed relative to its reported budget of well over one hundred million dollars, failing to justify the scale of its production. For a director known for commanding sweeping historical canvases with confidence, Exodus felt like a rare case of the formula simply not clicking.
These six films sit in an odd corner of film history, remembered less for what they achieved and more for how sharply they contrasted with everything surrounding them. None of them derailed the careers of the people who made them. If anything, the stumbles make the rest of these directors’ filmographies look even more impressive by comparison, proof that a bad outing here and there is simply part of working at that level for decades on end.
