Filmmaking is no picnic, as anyone who has seen anything from the Friedberg & Seltzer duo or Uwe Boll knows. Making an even sub-standard film requires a ludicrous amount of effort, and often, a filmmaker will sign on for a project with the best intentions, only for exterior factors to cause the final product to differ significantly from the original vision. The result? Directors who hate their own movies, but thankfully, there is a semi-formal process should a director want to disown their film, and that's by ascribing a pseudonym to the director's credit. Pre-2000, the name "Alan Smithee" was used when a director wanted to distance themselves from a project, and though all it takes these days is a Google click to find out who was the progenitor, it still allowed filmmakers a formal way to scratch an unsavoury project from their CV and basically pretend like it never happened. So, here are 10 movies so bad that their directors disowned them...
10. Babylon A.D. (Mathieu Kassovitz)
French director Mathieu Kassovitz hasn't made many films, but he has made one of the best pieces of foreign cinema of all time, and that's his stellar 1995 urban thriller-drama La Haine. He's never lived up to the promise since, cementing this fact with his spectacular 2008 sci-fi dud, Babylon A.D. A braindead, ineptly written and directed mess starring Vin Diesel, Kassovitz has spoken out about how much he hates the film, accusing 20th Century Fox of denying him control of the project and demanding a series of cuts. Referring to it as "pure violence and stupid", and like "a bad episode of 24", Kassovitz further went on that, "I never had a chance to do one scene the way it was written or the way I wanted it to be. The script wasnt respected. Bad producers, bad partners, it was a terrible experience". Though some claim Kassovitz became an ego-maniac and was unprofessional for ducking out of promotional duties, the end product speaks for itself; it is an unequivocal failure, one which Kassovitz has disowned, though not sought an alternate credit for.