10 Directors Who Sabotaged Their Own Movies

9. M. Night Shyamalan - Glass

While a writer-director who just writes a bad screenplay wouldn't usually be worthy of a list like this, in the case of M. Night Shyamalan, an exception seems worthwhile.

Remember that Shyamalan enjoyed a virtually unprecedented rise to stardom amid the success of the Best Picture-nominated The Sixth Sense, followed by a brutal spate of disappointments and flops from the mid-2000s through to the early 2010s.

Then the filmmaker made his comeback with the back-to-back success of The Visit and Split, the latter of which left everyone amped for his planned Unbreakable/Split sequel, Glass.

On paper everything seemed set for Shyamalan to cement his comeback with the three-peat, but in making screenwriting decisions so hilariously, frustratingly wrong-headed in Glass, he again proved to be his own worst enemy.

Glass of course underwhelmed fans of Unbreakable and Split with its deeply unsatisfying ending, whereby the three major super-powered characters were all killed, two of them in extremely anti-climactic fashion, while also destroying a potential franchise cash-cow in the process.

Shyamalan's expectation-defying final twist simply felt like the director repeating his earlier career mistakes again - namely relying overtly on shock value twists to propel his characters and story.

There was so much potential here for Glass to deepen these characters and expand this intriguingly low-fi superhero universe, but Shyamalan instead violently curb-stomped it to death all for the sake of a surprise. What a twist!

In a recent interview the director said he was shocked and upset by the vitriolic response to Glass, but given how obviously he took the wrong dramatic path, he has only himself to blame.