10 directors destined to be remembered for the wrong movie
Directors don’t have a say in their most defining work.
There are very few filmmakers who have a body of work so vast that their names speak for themselves. Steven Spielberg, Ridley Scott, Martin Scorsese, and Clint Eastwood have made so many great films that their involvement in an upcoming release is reason enough for cinephiles to be interested, and this recently happened with Christopher Nolan, as The Odyssey became a smash hit because his brand as a filmmaker is so strong.
However, a vast majority of directors are only as well-known as their most famous film, which can be either a good or bad thing depending on its qualities. Being involved with a well-known disaster can write a filmmaker a ticket to directors’ jail that they will never be able to fully get out of.
Nearly every contemporary film trailer has used the phrase “from the director of” to sell an upcoming release, as they bank on the popularity of the filmmaker’s most well-known work. This is obviously manipulative, as Guy Ritchie can be remembered as “the director of Snatch” or “the director of The Man From UNCLE”, without anyone remembering all the terrible films that he directed in between.
While some directors luck out by having one great film that defines their entire career, there are many others who are remembered for the wrong reason. Some of these defining films are downright bad, but others are just not representative of their style of direction or pale in comparison to their broader body of work.
10 directors who will be remembered for the wrong movie
‘Emilia Pérez’ (Jacques Audiard, 2024)
Emilia Pérez was among the most disliked ‘Best Picture’ nominees at the Academy Awards ever, and that was even before its star was revealed to be hateful and xenophobic, and it was the first exposure that many audiences had to the work of Jacques Audiard, who was dismissed as being a hack. The unfortunate reality is that Emilia Pérez is one of the worst films that Audiard has ever made, and he would be thought much more highly if it hadn’t gotten any Oscar nominations.
Audiard’s crime epic A Prophet is one of the most gripping prison dramas ever made, Deephan was a worthy winner of the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, Rust and Bone is a devastating emotional romance, and The Sisters Brothers is one of the best modern westerns; any of these is worth remembering far more than Emilia Pérez.
‘Don’t Worry Darling’ (Olivia Wilde, 2022)
Olivia Wilde ran into a truckload of controversy during the production of Don’t Worry Darling, in which wild rumours spread about her alleged romance with Harry Styles and its effect upon her divorce from Jason Sudeikis. The film got into even more hot water after the visibly awkward press conference at the Venice Film Festival, in which Chris Pine looked clearly annoyed and didn’t want to communicate with Styles; it was also revealed by Shia LaBeouf that he had quit the film because he wasn’t given enough time to rehearse, which contradicted Wilde’s claim that he was fired.
Don’t Worry Darling is undoubtedly a giant mess, but Wilde had been coming off the success of a charming coming-of-age comedy in Booksmart and has just made one of 2026’s best films with The Invite, so this drama shouldn’t be what defines her career.
‘Barbie’ (Greta Gerwig, 2023)
Greta Gerwig has somehow become one of the most powerful blockbuster directors in Hollywood, which would certainly come as a surprise to anyone who followed her independent work for the last 20 years. Gerwig was a brilliant actress who made all of Noah Baumbach’s films that she co-wrote better, and delivered an all-time coming-of-age classic with her directorial debut Lady Bird. Barbie was by no means a bad film, but it’s a very broad studio comedy with somewhat regressive politics that can’t say very much because it is still in the service of a brand that is selling toys.
Hopefully, Gerwig won’t spend the rest of her career making films like Barbie and The Chronicles of Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew, because it’s more personal projects like Lady Bird and her brilliant adaptation of Little Women that she should be best known for.
‘Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone’ (Chris Columbus, 2001)
Chris Columbus has been refreshingly honest about his experiences working on the Harry Potter franchise, and has managed to distance himself from the cynical HBO show and the hateful comments made by JK Rowling. Nonetheless, the fact that he helped kick off the entire Harry Potter phenomenon with the first two films in the series will stick with him forever, even if he isn’t to blame for what it became.
Neither of the first two films is bad, but Columbus has done much better films that he was more essential to. Even though John Hughes, Macaluy Culkin, Catherine O’Hara, and Joe Pesci tend to be given the most credit for the first two Home Alone films, it was Columbus who ensured that they were Christmas classics. Similarly, his contributions to Mrs Doubtfire are somewhat overshadowed by the popularity of Robin Williams.
‘Suicide Squad’ (David Ayer, 2016)
David Ayer was caught in an unenviable situation when he directed the DCEU film Suicide Squad, which faced a number of issues involving temperamental cast members and the studio wresting away control. However, Ayer isn’t among those most responsible for the film’s failings, and has shown himself to be a competent action filmmaker when working outside of the superhero genre.
End of Watch is one of the better cop movies of the 21st century, Fury is a brutally old-fashioned World War II thriller, and The Beekeeper is the platonic ideal of what a ‘Jason Statham revenge film’ should look like because of how goofy and self-aware he is. Unlike Zack Snyder, who continues to cite his DCEU work and attempt to defend his bad films, Ayer has been able to move on to better things that are more suitable for his interests.
‘Kraven the Hunter’ (JC Chandor, 2024)
Aaron Taylor-Johnson signing on to play a Spider-Man villain in Sony’s standalone Marvel universe didn’t sound like a completely terrible idea at first because of the talents of writer/director JC Chandor, who had received an Academy Award nomination for ‘Best Original Screenplay’ for his debut feature Margin Call. Kraven the Hunter was a massive bomb that failed to become a blockbuster, sparking endless ridicule, but it’s actually the first ‘bad’ film that Chandor has made.
After Margin Call, he directed Robert Redford to a late-career triumph with the survival drama All is Lost, made an old-fashioned ‘70s crime epic with A Most Violent Year, and delivered one of the few legitimately good Netflix original action films with Triple Frontier. His track record outside of Kraven the Hunter is impressive, and he would do himself a favour by returning to work on smaller films.
‘Supergirl’ (Craig Gillespie, 2026)
The newly formed DC Studios has already begun to face the same issues of its predecessor because of the disastrous release of Supergirl, which bombed in a way that the superhero genre hasn’t seen in quite some time. While it is evident that DC Studios head James Gunn had been interfering with the project from the beginning and made some bad choices, it seems as if director Craig Gillespie has taken all the blame for its collapse.
Ironically, Gillespie has a much better track record than Gunn, having made a hit indie with Lars and the Real Girl, a successful horror remake with Fright Night, an old-fashioned aquatic adventure with The Finest Hours, an Oscar-nominated biopic with I, Tonya, one of the few successful Disney live-action remakes with Cruella, an entertaining ‘ripped from the headlines’ true story with Dumb Money, and an Emmy-nominated miniseries with Pam & Tommy, all of which should be more than enough to secure his legacy.
‘Michael’ (Antoine Fuqua, 2026)
Michael Jackson has such an obsessive fan base that the biopic Michael was destined to be a hit, regardless of its quality, but the film received a great deal of criticism for cutting out any controversies and presenting Jackson as a flawless hero; however, the reality is that the Jackson estate was the one calling the shots, and not director Antoine Fuqua.
Fuqua has otherwise been a safe pair of hands for mid-budget genre films, with Training Day being a massive cultural sensation that won Denzel Washington the Academy Award for ‘Best Actor’. He also collaborated with Washington on The Equalizer trilogy and The Magnificent Seven remake, and has directed successful star vehicles for actors like Jake Gyllenhaal in Southpaw, Clive Owen in King Arthur, Mark Wahlberg in Shooter, Gerard Butler in Olympus Has Fallen, Ethan Hawke in Brooklyn’s Finest, and Bruce Willis in Tears of the Sun.
‘The Shape of Water’ (Guillermo del Toro, 2017)
Guillermo del Toro was considered overdue for an Academy Award when he won both ‘Best Director’ and ‘Best Picture’ for The Shape of Water, beating out more deserving films like Lady Bird, Call Me By Your Name, Phantom Thread, Dunkirk, and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, but his film is too pleasant a tribute to monster movies that plays much broader than del Toro’s usual output, which tends to be grittier.
Pan’s Labyrinth is the true masterpiece that del Toro should be remembered for, but he’s a surprisingly versatile filmmaker who has made a true body horror classic in The Devil’s Backbone, a twisty gothic romance in Crimson Peak, above average superhero fare with the Hellboy films, an animated classic in Guillemro del Toro’s Pinocchio, and psychological anti-hero story in Nightmare Alley, all of which are destined to age much better than The Shape of Water.
‘Kingsman: The Secret Service’ (Matthew Vaughn, 2015)
It’s easy to forget that there was a brief moment where Matthew Vaughn was considered to be a massively appealing filmmaker who was heavily rumoured to be involved in Star Wars, and few films have aged worse than Kingsman: The Secret Service, a broad and crass satire of Roger Moore James Bond films (which were already self-aware to begin with) that only got worse when Vaughn expanded the universe with a sequel, a prequel, and a bizarre spinoff.
Vaughn’s ego may have gotten the better of him in thinking that he could turn Kingsman into a cinematic universe, but he had previously shown talent with the gritty gangster thriller Layer Cake, the high fantasy adventure Stardust, the pre-Deadpool superhero satire Kick-Ass, and X-Men: First Class, one of the best instalments in the franchise. Hopefully, he has gotten Kingsman out of his system entirely.
