10 Worst Movies by Great Directors

While the days of movies serving as a cultural monolith are long gone, there are still names out there that demand as much as hundreds of millions of dollars in investment from companies and demand from audience members many hours in driving to theaters, watching ads, reading or writing essays devoted to their work. Whether it be blockbuster directors or niche artists.

What can be just as fascinating as a master in a craft producing their best, and in its own way entertaining, is when these directors fail in their ambitions as badly as they can. As Christiane Kubrick claimed in her photographic biography Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures that her husband told her, all movies, whether good, bad, or mediocre, have something to teach. So let’s not just get schadenfreude out of the way: Highly praised filmmakers had misfires. Let’s see what there is to learn from their mistakes.

Related: 10 Directors Who Made One Horror Film & Quit

10 Stanley Kubrick: Fear and Desire

More than 25 years after his death, Stanley Kubrick remains one of the most iconic, discussed, and parodied filmmakers. Entire films have been released based on fan interpretations of his films, such as the 2012 film Room 237 regarding The Shining. But in 1952, twenty-two-year-old Kubrick still had to make his first feature-length fiction and prove himself.

So, with a skeletal cast and crew, he made a feature about three soldiers lost behind enemy lines in an unnamed country in an unnamed war (though budget practicalities dictated everyone wear WWII American uniforms), primarily financed by his uncle. The result was a financial and critical failure. Even though the director’s cut was only 70 minutes long, it was so heavily derided for being slow that Kubrick cut it down to 62 minutes. This just goes to show just how short people’s attention spans were back then.

Kubrick himself would savage the end result. In a 1966 radio interview, he recited a line in it: “We spend our lives running our fingers down lists of names and addresses, trying to find our real names” to illustrate how he felt the script by Howard Sackler was “dull, undramatic, but very serious.” Considering the silly and inaccurate sentiment expressed in that line, it’s hard to dispute his point or blame him if the anecdote he tried to collect and destroy all the copies is true.^[]

9 Alfred Hitchcock: Marnie

As celebrated and a product of his time as Alfred Hitchcock was, now you’ll as often hear his work derided and labeled “overrated” as praised. In 2023, the Washington Post published an article about how Vertigo is either one of the best or worst movies ever made. When comparing it with 1964’s Marnie, though, even Vertigo’s detractors would likely regard it as much closer to the greatest movie ever made.

Marnie is about the titular woman, played by Tippi Hedrin, who steals $10,000 from her employer in a surprisingly shameless repeat of the setup for Psycho. Where Marnie goes in a very different, very wrong direction is by having Mark (Sean Connery) catch wind of it and use that information to blackmail her into marriage. In what sounds like a modern feminist joke but is played deadly seriously, Mark doggedly pursues the answers to why the wife he’s blackmailing refuses to have sex with him and also why she has a strong aversion to the color red.

The result is a story centered around two deeply unsympathetic characters who are still treated as sympathetic, with little more than splashes of light to engage the viewer in the meantime. Even Hitchcock films that are more often held up to be his worst (Torn Curtain, Topaz, etc.) aren’t as off-putting in their central character dynamic.^[2]

8 John Carpenter: Ghosts of Mars

Carpenter might be the king of making unprofitable films in their day, but then are considered classics (or at least cult classics) over time. The Thing, Big Trouble in Little China, They Live, In the Mouth of Madness, Prince of Darkness, and so on. Not that there haven’t been runaway successes such as the iconic National Film Registry entrant Halloween or Escape from New York.

There are, unfortunately, a few which fall into neither camp. No film on his resume offers less chance of positive audience reevaluation that lifts it to classic status than Ghosts of Mars, a 2001 movie set in 2176 about Martian zombies attacking a Martian Police Force. This is especially unfortunate since, according to Red Letter Media, this was a pet project for him that had been in development for a long time.

One of the major problems with the movie is Natasha Henstridge’s performance. As reported on the website Outlaw Vern, her stiff acting was very likely due to her being a last-minute replacement for Courtney Love (a week before the shoot started, and only selected because her boyfriend had already been cast) and because it was her sixth starring role of an extremely busy year. The script also did no one any favors, featuring a huge number of pace-slowing flashbacks, which inherently lessened the suspense because an audience has a general idea of how a flashback will resolve.

Action scenes were often shot in static, long takes, which lessened the dynamism and ability of the eye to follow the action. Even stray articles like a 2021 editorial in The Guardian couldn’t save its reputation. At least it’s not a case of Carpenter’s career ending on a bad note, as he kept working for another decade after that, making such underrated flicks as Pro-Life for the Masters of Horror series.^[3]

7 Park Chan-wook: The Moon Is the Sun’s Dream

Park Chan-wook’s Vengeance trilogy is one of the most celebrated collections of films in the world, particularly the middle entry Oldboy. On the other hand, there’s his 1992 debut film, a crime romance that failed at the box office. As Chan-wook said in a 2006 interview, he became relieved that the movie was so little seen for what an embarrassment he considered it.

Chan-wook’s own criticisms of the film included that its tone was shrilly melodramatic. Considering that the film is a romantic triangle between a gang boss’s mistress, a gangster, and the gangster’s photographer brother, it’s unsurprising that the emotions on screen went over the top.

There also was a decision to cast one of the male leads with a singer who’d been banned from appearing on television, one which Chan-wook disagreed with and which hamstrung the inexperienced director’s ability to direct him. Chan-wook also tried to prevent the home video release of it and his second film, Trio, indicating even the best directors can take some time to find their feet.

This will not be the last time we hear of Park Chan-wook on this list.^[4]

6 Ingmar Bergman: The Serpent’s Egg

For decades, Bergman’s 1958 touchstone The Seventh Seal was basically the paradigm for what Americans meant when they considered an art film from Europe, especially the iconic shot of the cast hand-in-hand running up a hill with Death in the lead. Bergman has had plenty of envelope-pushing character-driven masterpieces since then, particularly 1973’s Cries and Whispers, which mixes very repressed emotions with moments that are still shocking today.

In 1977, under the oversight of notoriously flamboyant director Dino de Laurentis, he made his career nadir The Serpent’s Egg, his only movie shot entirely in English. The Serpent’s Egg is ostensibly the story of Keith Carradine and Liv Ullman as a circus performer and the widow of his brother (echoes of The Moon Is the Sun’s Dream) as they explore Weimar Republic Germany in 1923 for answers about to why the brother committed suicide.

In practice, critics such as Roger Ebert found that it’s about Bergman trying to say something profound about Germany’s slide into fascism and ending up making a movie where the strongest impression is “no form, no pattern.” Other critics reported how Carradine was woefully out of place and that Ullman’s performance outside of her native language seemed to push her performance into camp. Bergman still had masterpieces like 1983’s Fanny and Alexander to deliver the world, so The Serpent’s Egg is an unfortunate failed experiment in many ways.^[4]

5 Akira Kurosawa: The Idiot

Akira Kurosawa is likely not the only Japanese director that American film buffs are familiar with. There’s also Kenji Mizoguchi and Masaki Kobayashi, among others. Kurosawa, however, with his professional associations with George Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola, and Steven Spielberg, is by far the most exposed Japanese director in America. He has been since American studios started remaking his films in the 1960s. One film that certainly wasn’t going to be directly remade was Kurosawa’s mutilated 1951 adaptation of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, a follow-up to his break-out hit Rashomon.

Kurosawa’s loose adaptation centers on a man recently released from a mental asylum who returns to his hometown and has a relationship with two women (romantic triangles being a recurring plot element on this list). Despite the relatively simple premise, the final movie is surprisingly hard to follow.

This is largely because, with an original runtime of 265 minutes, Kurosawa cut the theatrical edition down to 166. Taking out more than a third of any movie’s runtime is sure to create gaping holes in its story structure and jarring pacing issues, and this one was no exception. Despite its likely considerable artistic merit, or at least value as a curio, Kurosawa’s original, vastly more coherent cut is so far lost.^[6]

4 Steven Spielberg: Ready Player One

Before 2018, Spielberg’s worst movie would generally be considered either 1979’s labored comedy 1941 or 1989’s largely forgotten remake Always. Spielberg himself would probably say it was either his childhood film Firelight or his 1969 studio short Amblin. The title was taken definitively by his adaptation of Ernest Cline’s 2011 debut novel.

The fundamental problem with Ready Player One is the philosophical outlook of the story. As Sage Hyden of the YouTube channel Just Write explained, the central defining feature of Wade Watts in the movie is that he is the world’s biggest expert on pop culture trivia and the life of James Halliday. Watts’s ability to recite the dialogue verbatim of movies from certain eras or be a living wiki for every TV show is less compelling as a character than his having interpretations of those same properties and being able to convey the emotional/thematic content of the same. Indeed, it feels more like how reasonably the villains of the piece would approach the quest, and Watts’s ability to get to the heart and soul of popular culture is how he succeeds in his hero’s journey.^[7]

3 Spike Lee: Oldboy

Since his 1986 debut She’s Gotta Have It, Spike Lee has had four films that resonated with critics and general audiences sufficiently to be listed in the National Film Registry. Yet his status as a cultural treasure has not prevented Lee from doing what would generally be regarded as paycheck movies. Never did his lack of engagement with a project shine brighter than his 2013 remake of Park Chan-wook’s 2003 classic.

As Adam Johnston broke down in his staggeringly thorough but highly informative video essay, Lee’s Oldboy is practically a scene-for-scene remake of Chan-wook’s. Still, most creative choices tell the story more weakly. This is most pronounced comparing the original, iconic hallway fight scene, which is shot in a single continuous take where all action is cramped but easy to follow and memorable to the remake’s version. There are multiple shots, the space is so open the eye receives too much information to follow cleanly, and above all, the effect is a much more conventional action scene.

In a repeat of Kurosawa’s career low point, Lee is hardly to blame for all the problems an audience member might have with the movie, as reportedly, an hour of the run time was taken from his director’s cut, leaving both him and star Josh Brolin dissatisfied with the end product. While the execution of complete scenes in the theatrical cut indicates that even the director’s cut is nowhere near the power of the original, pacing and storytelling problems are almost inevitable when that much is removed from a story.^[8]

2 Martin Scorsese: Cape Fear

Of all the directors who have converted their names to prestige brands, Scorsese might have the most financial clout. Who else could command a $200 million budget for a racially complicated period piece like Killers of the Flower Moon? Back in the ’80s and ’90s, he had to do his fair share of work-for-hire projects to make up for box office flops like The King of Comedy and New York, New York.

While it was a box office success and received respectful reviews at the time, 1991’s Cape Fear has aged the worst of those ’90s projects. Worse even than Kundun, which was regarded as one of the worst of Scorsese’s films for years. The central flaw of Cape Fear compared to the 1962 film is a matter of structure.

As Scott Ashlin pointed out in his pair of Cape Fear reviews, it’s the story of a rightfully convicted Max Cady, who is released from prison and uses the letter of the law to shield him while he stalks the attorney Sam Bowden that he feels wronged him. In the 1962 version, Bowden initially explores legal avenues to get Cady to back off in a reasonable manner. He only starts turning to criminal methods out of desperation.

However, in the remake, Bowden, played by Nick Nolte, tries both at once, leaving his approach to the conflict muddled. Furthermore, he is explicitly written as having intentionally sabotaged Cady’s case by withholding evidence. He tells his wife early in the movie, which is a clear violation of his professional oath and compromises his morals before the events of the movie properly begin, depriving the film of a potential dramatic reveal at the end.

Beyond the screenplay, the performances of Cape Fear are highly dubious. As Bowden’s daughter, Juliette Lewis is very stiff, particularly when providing narration. Hollywood Reporter dismissed Robert DeNiro’s notoriously flamboyant take on the villain Max Cady as a “camp-up.” The sum of the parts is that classic Cape Fear wasn’t updated or deconstructed so much as it was haphazardly imitated.^[9]

1 Francis Ford Coppola: One from the Heart

To paraphrase former AV Club writer Nathan Rabin, while Spielberg chose his projects with his brain, and it made him a billionaire, Coppola chose projects with his heart, and it nearly destroyed him. So, with that in mind, Coppola made One from the Heart in 1982. It was supposed to be a cheap, modest romance. However, it went out of control in terms of budget when Coppola tried to film the entire project with huge dance numbers, featuring multiple cameras running at once, or “live filmmaking” as Coppola dubbed it. The end result lost most of its $28 million budget, which was huge for the time (for comparison, Raiders of the Lost Ark from 1980 cost $20 million). This failure resulted in Coppola becoming the sort of gun-for-hire director who had to make films like 1996’s Jack.

Basically, the story is about a couple, played by Frederic Forrest and Teri Garr, who argue, break up, and get into relationships with other people but end up getting back together. The issue isn’t so much that Forrest and Garr lack chemistry as their characters are written as getting into such bitter arguments that it’s harder to believe that they would have ever become a couple in the first place, let alone that an audience should want to follow their romance or desire to see them reunited.

As a review in The Guardian put it, each of the significant others they meet while separated seem like much more interesting people. The actors also seem to have more chemistry with them, or at least, they’re less inclined to argue with them. Since that leaves only musical numbers to keep audiences engaged, the entire project has a howling, bickering romantic void at its core. The distributor more or less conceded the terribleness of the romance in its release, as the DVD offered an option to watch a version of the film that only included the musical numbers.^[10]

Dustin Koski also wrote the fantasy adventure comedy Robin Hood vs. King Arthur. Check it out so that, someday, it might be adapted into the worst movie made by a great filmmaker!