10 Directors Who Slammed Their Own Movies

9. Stephen Hopkins (The Ghost And The Darkness)

Val Kilmer and Michael Douglas The Ghost and the Darkness
Paramount Pictures

With a mixed 51 percent on Rotten Tomatoes and a single Oscar win (albeit in a technical category - Sound Editing) 1996's The Ghost and the Darkness isn't considered an awful film - but director Stephen Hopkins would probably disagree.

Reportedly, the production was an absolute nightmare, with snake bites, scorpion bites, and dangerous weather conditions (lightning, floods) plaguing the shoot. Oh, and many scenes in the film involved the use of real lions, which, as you can imagine, wasn't easy to manage.

Adding insult to injury, The Ghost and the Darkness then went on to flop at the box-office, and Hopkins later called it a "mess", adding that it left such a bad taste in his mouth, that he hasn't been able to watch it in full.

Cheer up mate, you got a Sound Editing Oscar! Everyone wants one of those!

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Contributor

Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!