10 Filmmakers Who Defended Their Terrible Movies

Come on Shyamalan, The Last Airbender sucks - and you know it!

Anne Hathaway Serenity
Avrion Pictures

Even when a movie reviews poorly, flops at the box-office, and is generally considered to be a failure, there's probably someone out there who likes it.

The subjectivity of film dictates as much, and though most will agree that Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen is a big bag of trash, and that Battlefield Earth is best watched by picking up the remote and turning off the TV, these movies will have their fans.

It's a similar story behind-the-scenes too. With tons of passion, attention, and hard work being poured into even the most critically-derided flicks, there are likely dozens, if not hundreds of crew members who are still rather fond of those pictures.

And even after their project has been damned by the public, these filmmakers will often speak out on behalf of their movies, either offering up an explanation for what went wrong, or simply defending a film they still believe has merit.

It's not surprising that the actors, directors, writers, and producers who work on these films for months (or even years) want to stand up for them in the face of a public bashing, and that's exactly what these particular filmmakers did.

10. Jerry Bruckheimer Claims The Lone Ranger Is "Terrific"

Anne Hathaway Serenity
Disney

Clearly an attempt to capture that Pirates Of The Caribbean magic, 2013's The Lone Ranger brought back the exact same creative team behind that swashbuckling series: leading man Johnny Depp, director Gore Verbinski, writers Ted Elliot and Terry Rossio, and producer Jerry Bruckheimer.

But it wasn't to be. The Lone Ranger was utterly annihilated by critics, and it ranks as one of the biggest box-office flops in recent memory.

Despite this negative response, the filmmakers don't think the movie is all that bad. Speaking to the press around the time of its release, Bruckheimer called it "terrific", adding that the critics simply "missed" what made it so great.

Elsewhere, Depp (and co-star Armie Hammer) defended the movie's vitriolic reception by claiming that critics were "gunning" for the project, with Hammer even labelling all American critics "sad".

As evidenced by the abysmal box-office run The Lone Ranger suffered in the months after this press day, these comments did little to sway public opinion on the movie.

Shocking, we know.

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Contributor

Danny has been with WhatCulture for almost nine years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. He has been writing and video editing for 10+ years, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers and uploading them to YouTube (they're admittedly a bit rusty by today's standards). If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order or to tell you about the making of 1988's Remembrance of the Daleks, Danny is the person to ask.