10 Directors Who Survived Huge Movie Failures
7. David Fincher (Alien 3)
While Alien 3 was a moderate success at the box-office, it was still a failure in terms of the impact it had on David Fincher's reputation.
For one thing, it received mixed reviews from critics, and is widely regarded as the worst movie out of the original four, certainly nowhere near the quality of the first two films in the series. But all that aside, it was the movie's behind-the-scenes troubles that really but Fincher's Hollywood career in jeopardy.
Fincher - who, back then, was an unproven name - was constantly hounded and pressured by the studio, and this resulted in one of the messiest production cycles a major movie has ever endured. On top of only being given a few weeks of prep time, he had to start shooting without a completed script, and, in his own words, he was even "fired off it three times". Fox wasn't happy with him, or with the production itself.
So, even though the resulting mess of a film wasn't completely Fincher's fault, he took most of the blame because his name was under the "director" slot. Under normal circumstances, Alien 3 would've been a career-ender, but he bounced back with a vengeance a few years later.
Instead of keeping his head down and vanishing, he went on to make cinematic classics like Se7en, Fight Club, The Social Network and Gone Girl, proving that Alien 3 was in no way representative of his filmmaking talent.