10 Directors Who Slammed Their Own Movies
4. Renny Harlin (Exorcist: The Beginning)
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.