Hollywood is a fickle maiden; one day you can be on top of the world, and the next you're at the bottom of the dung-heap, tricking yourself out for money (in Hollywood, that's the equivalent of working on an Uwe Boll film). Sometimes people will fall from grace, and other times they will rise unexpectedly to glory, but in these 10 instances, the prevailing similarity is that we never could have seen it coming. Sometimes it's not even about a big star slumming it or a nobody making it big, but simply a transition that doesn't make sense. As a result, we've got Oscar winners directing dreck, poor actors becoming great directors, and lowly immigrants shipping over to America and changing the cinematic landscape forever. Here are 10 Hollywood career paths nobody saw coming...
10. Peter Jackson - From Directing Splatter Movies To Oscar-Winning Epics
Peter Jackson began his career making splatter movies on a shoestring budget such as Bad Taste, and was eventually able to make a slightly-higher budget splatter movie, Braindead, that captured the audience's imagination and has become a cult classic (as well as, in my unpopular opinion, the director's best film to date). Jackson followed this up with two visually stunning, diverting fantasy features, Heavenly Creatures and The Frighteners, which eventually allowed him to somehow get the gig directing the epic Lord of the Rings trilogy five years later. Who would have looked at Jackson after Bad Taste and assumed that he'd be capable of helming one of the biggest and most iconic franchises in movie history? It came completely out of nowhere, and given that Jackson had only directed a solid yet not great film 5 years prior, what exactly was it that put him in such good stead with New Line? Nevertheless, the results were wondrous, and Jackson scooped 3 Oscars for his work on Return of the King.