Random Directors Who Hated Their Own Movies (15 items)

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  (#1) Josh Trank - Fantastic Four

  Josh Trank's reboot of the Fantastic Four was one of the biggest bombs in recent film history, and the director places much of the blame on the studio. In a since-deleted tweet, the director said that he had made "a fantastic version" of the film that audiences would "probably never see." Even before the tweet, stories of Trank's erratic on-set behavior leaked, and after, blame for the expensive comic book movie debacle continued to spiral out of control.
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  (#2) Steven Spielberg - Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom

  Remembered by many children of the '80s as the Indiana Jones movie that made them fear for the well-being of their beating hearts, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom is still a rare black mark on Steven Spielberg's resume, according to the director. The dark tone of the film is attributed to the nasty breakups that Spielberg and his producing partner George Lucas were going through at the time; Lucas and his wife Marcia Griffin divorced, and Spielberg and his girlfriend Kathleen Carey split after three years.
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  (#3) David Fincher - Alien 3

  The turbulent story behind the making of Alien 3 could fill a book. From the multitude of scripts to huge lawsuits, expensive additional shooting and a rotating cast that left much of the film up in the air to the last minute, David Fincher's first feature film was a disaster before one frame of film had even been shot. Fincher ended up walking off the film before editing began, and completely disavowed the film, leaving it off his resume to this day. And even though a 2003 "reassembly" edit was released that was closer to Fincher's vision, he's still plenty unhappy with the outcome. 
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  (#4) Tony Kaye - American History X

  The making of American History X has more twists and turns that your average Hollywood film. Although it began as Kaye's first directorial feature, after he began to cut the film down to a bare-bones 87 minutes, the film's producers suggested that he work with the film's star, Edward Norton, to beef the film back up. Kaye balked, then he brought in a priest, a rabbi, and a Tibetan monk in to the office of New Line’s president, elaborately asking for an extension on editing his cut of the film. The president said no, that they were going to release the version he and Norton put together. After the film was released, Kaye tried to get his name scratched from the film, but the Directors Guild said no dice. 
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  (#5) Michael Bay - Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

  Michael Bay is such a big director that he never has to explain any of his films. Even if they're awful (which most of them are), the movies still often rake in over a billion dollars apiece, so who cares? In 2011, Bay went on record to say that the second Tranformers movie, Revenge of the Fallen, "was crap." He places most of the blame on the writers strike that took place prior to the shooting of the film. 
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  (#6) Woody Allen - Annie Hall

  Annie Hall is considered by cinephiles not only one of Woody Allen's best films, but a touchstone for romantic comedies. Unfortunately, the director doesn't believe this to be true. His early idea for the film was titled Anhedonia and was much more ambitious, with the romance as just a subplot. At a 2012 press conference to promote From Rome With Love Allen insisted that Annie Hall fell short of his much more experimental vision. Even though it did win the Oscar for Best Picture.
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  (#7) David Lynch - Dune

  David Lynch is a weirdo cinematic visionary, so it makes sense that the one film in his oeuvre that he distances himself from is Dune, the adaptation of Frank Herbert's literary sic-fi classic.Lynch rarely speaks about the film, but he has mentioned that he wasn't given final cut of the film, an early mainstream effort from a notorious oddball. His lack of creative control on Dune probably has something to do with its expulsion from his canon. When the studio cobbled together a extra hour of cut footage to assemble an 'extended cut,' Lynch asked that they change his screenwriting credit to the pseudonym "Judas Booth" - an amalgam of Judas Iscariot and John Wilkes Booth - to signify his feelings towards what he believed was the studio's 'betrayal.'
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  (#8) Joel Schumacher - Batman & Robin

  Joel Schumacher basically wrecked the Batman franchise for about a decade with his abysmal Batman & Robin, a sequel to slightly less awful but still really bad Batman Forever. The director has gone on record to apologize for making a miserable film, even going so far as to say that he wanted to make a dark and gritty Batman: Year One, but Warner Bros. vetoed him. Suuuure you did Joel, sure you did. 
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  (#9) Alfred Hitchcock - Rope

  Alfred Hitchcock's Rope is one of the experimental and groundbreaking films that the director ever made. Executed as one long, uninterrupted, impossibly complex take, the movie revolves around a murder that may or may not have happened. After its release, Hitchcock referred to the film as nothing more than a stunt. Even if Hitch didn't think too highly of it, Rope is an fascinating piece of cinematic history. 
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  (#10) Dennis Hopper - Catchfire

  It's rare that production is able to put so many talented people in a room together and make something as terrible as Catchfire, or Backtrack as it would later come to be known on late night cable TV. Seriously, look at the cast list for the film. It's stupid how much A-List talent shows up in this movie (including Bob Dylan). During his lifetime, Hopper never said anything about the fact that he completely removed his name from Catchfire, but it's assumed that it has something to do with the final cut being taken away. 
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  (#11) Stanley Kubrick - Fear and Desire

  Stanley Kubrick may have dismissed his feature directorial debut as “a bumbling amateur film exercise,” but that hasn't kept audiences from wanting to see it. After years of the film coming up MIA and rumors that Kubrick destroyed all the prints, the film finally saw the light of day via Turner Classic Movies in 2011, well over a decade after Kubrick's death.
  
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  (#12) Steven Soderbergh - The Underneath

  Steven Soderbergh's first film, Sex, Lies, and Videotape, absolutely killed at the Cannes Film Festival and set the bar for independent cinema for the decade that followed. Unfortunately, his first big studio  film, The Underneath, a film-noir about a man stealing money from an armored car, is considered "kind of a mess” and “dead on arrival” by the director. But don't  worry about Steven, he's done alright for himself. 
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  (#13) Jerry Lewis - The Day The Clown Cried

  Jerry Lewis's single unreleased film is about a German clown who's sent to work in Auschwitz where he leads children to their deaths in the gas chamber. It should come as no surprise that the infamous movie never made it past the rough cut. Until recently, Lewis never planned to release the film, considering it a massive embarrassment and a complete miscalculation.  The only surviving print of the film has been given to the Library of Congress. Fear not, film fans: The Day The Clown Cried will finally have a very small release in 2025. 
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  (#14) Arthur Hiller - An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn

  When Arthur Hill set out to film an acerbic take down of the film industry, he probably didn't realize that his life would become an ironic extension of the parody he was committing to film. After seeing the final cut of his film about a director whose film is taken from him by the studio, he had his name struck from the credits, but it was too late. The film bombed and essentially killed the career of plenty of people involved with it. 
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  (#15) Mathieu Kassovitz - Babylon A.D.

  Anyone who's had the distinct pleasure of seeing Babylon A.D. will know that the Vin Diesel-starring scifi stinker is a big mess. According to some, Mathieu Kassovitz (the film's director) was an egomaniac who was unprofessional for ducking out of promotional duties. But Kassovitz insists that the film that could have been was gummed up by Fox and their lawyers. If you're looking for an out, it's always safe to blame the lawyers. 

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