10 Directors Who Slammed Their Own Movies

9. Stephen Hopkins (The Ghost And The Darkness)

THUMB Michael Bay
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 almost nine years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. He has been writing and video editing for 10+ years, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers and uploading them to YouTube (they're admittedly a bit rusty by today's standards). If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order or to tell you about the making of 1988's Remembrance of the Daleks, Danny is the person to ask.