10 Directors Who Slammed Their Own Movies

5. Mathieu Kassovitz (Babylon A.D.)

Vin Diesel Babylon A.D.
20th Century Studios

Vin Diesel movies that don't have the words "fast" or "furious" in the title generally tend to struggle, and his 2008 sci-fi flop Babylon A.D. was no different.

Audiences hated it, critics hated it, and director Mathieu Kassovitz hated it too, and though you'd expect him to keep those feelings to himself until the movie had finished its theatrical run... he didn't.

Pulling a move that would later be replicated by Michael Bay (who we'll get to later), and Tom Holland in the run-up to Uncharted, Kassovitz started bashing his own film before it had even released, branding it "pure violence and stupidity", which, to be fair, is actually a good description of most Vin Diesel movies.

Kassovitz then added that Babylon A.D. was like "a bad episode of 24", and unsurprisingly, he hasn't been invited to direct a big-budget Hollywood movie since.

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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!