10 Directors Who Survived Huge Movie Failures
4. Steven Spielberg (1941)
With a career as long and varied as Steven Spielberg's has been, there are bound to be a handful of low points, and his war comedy 1941 is definitely up there with the worst things he's ever directed.
While Spielberg is great at injecting levity into his action, sci-fi and drama films, he's no good at making pure comedy movies, and it shows here. One of the worst-reviewed films of his career, the movie had an underwhelming run at the box-office to boot, and even Spielberg himself has admitted that it wasn't as good as it should have been.
1941 felt like even more of a failure because it directly followed two of the director's best movies: Jaws, and Close Encounters. Maybe he felt untouchable after the enormous success of those two flicks - or maybe he just dropped the ball - but 1941 was like vomiting at the end of an amazing night out, a huge roadblock for Spielberg that proved he wasn't as impenetrable as his last two films had made him seem.
It's also important to remember that 1941 was made very early in Spielberg's career. If he put the same movie out today, we'd all shrug it off because he's Steven freakin' Spielberg, but back then, there was a risk that a second dud could've sent him to Hollywood jail for a good long while.
But obviously, that didn't happen. Spielberg rebounded by not just making a "good" movie - he made Raiders of the Lost Ark, one of the best movies he's ever made, and one of the best movies that anybody has ever made, full-stop. 1941 was a bad day at the office, and has in no way tarnished his reputation as one of the all-time greats.