10 Directors Who Slammed Their Own Movies

4. Renny Harlin (Exorcist: The Beginning)

Exorcist The Beginning
Warner Bros. Pictures

In a chat with The Guardian in 2021, Exorcist: The Beginning director Renny Harlin told the outlet "I knew from the script that it wasn’t going to be great."

And in the end, his instincts proved to be bang on the money.

Harlin signed on to helm the film after original director Paul Schrader was fired, which obviously wasn't an ideal situation to enter. Even worse, Harlin was instructed to reshoot everything Schrader had already filmed, and that's not to mention the series of spooky incidents that happened throughout production, including Harlin being hit by a car and hospitalized, car tyres blowing up at random, and, most bizarrely, the roof of a crew member's house being torn apart by five giant crows.

The "reward" for all this trouble was a disastrous 10% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, a box-office flop, and William Peter Blatty (writer of the original Exorcist) calling The Beginning his most "humiliating professional experience."

In that same interview with The Guardian, Harlin also said that The Beginning "didn’t come out very well", which, frankly, feels like a wee bit of an understatement.

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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!