10 Directors Who Never Topped Their First Film

To Frank Darabont's credit, how do you possibly top The Shawshank Redemption? Regardless of who you are, it's always going to be near impossible for a director to surpass a film that amasses a whopping seven Academy Award nominations.

For Darabont, he would twice return to the works of legendary author Stephen King, adapting King's The Green Mile in 1999 and then The Mist in 2007 in the years since Shawshank's 1994 release. While The Green Mile itself would actually pick up four Oscar nominations, neither that movie nor The Mist, while both extremely impressive, were at the level of The Shawshank Redemption.

Jim Carrey vehicle The Majestic was sandwiched in between The Green Mile and The Mist, but that was another picture left with the unenvious task of living up to what had been served up with Shawshank.

Frank Darabont may have directed one TV movie (Buried Alive) and one straight-to-video effort (Nightshift Collection) previously, yet making his full cinematic directorial bow with The Shawshank Redemption is the stuff of dreams for a filmmaker. On the flip side, of course, you then have a ridiculously high standard to live up to with each and every project that follows such a successful picture.