10 Directors Who Should Never Be Trusted With Giant Budgets

3. M. Night Shyamalan

It's hard to think of a high-profile filmmaker that has suffered a fall from grace quite like M. Night Shyamalan in recent times. A mere fifteen years after The Sixth Sense was nominated for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Original Screenplay and saw the writer/director lauded as the most promising talent of his generation, his last four movies were widely panned and have been racking up nominations at the Razzies instead: a return to smaller-scale film-making is well overdue. Made for $40m, The Sixth Sense would go on to earn $672.8m at the box office and infiltrate popular culture in the process. His next two movies, Unbreakable and Signs, would each cost around $75m and bring in a combined total of over $650m, along with positive critical responses. From here, things would go downhill as Shyamalan's penchant for over-indulgence would often get the better of him. The Village did solid business despite middling reviews, but the pretentious Lady In The Water would earn only $72.7m worldwide before the unintentionally hilarious killer plants of The Happening would see his stock plummet even further. The $150m Last Airbender is undoubtedly one of the worst blockbusters in recent memory, which nonetheless did decent business at the box office before Shyamalan swept up at the Razzies. After Earth was almost as expensive and just as dull, a relentlessly po-faced sci-fi that placed charisma-free Jaden Smith at the forefront in a show of Hollywood nepotism at its worst. Shyamalan is a talented director, but as a writer he just can't reign in his self-indulgence. Hopefully his currently shooting micro-budget effort Sundowning will refresh his creativity because the man has proven he is not to be trusted with a blockbuster budget.