10 Great Directors Who Haven't Made Anything Good For Years

5. Tim Burton

While most other directors in this list are guilty of making a succession of bad films, Burton's only crime is that he's used the same filmmaking style since 1985 and it's now worn painfully thin. His distinctive and gothic-inspred visual approach led to him producing some of the most stunning looking films of the late 80s and 90s, but he's failed spectacularly to update his approach in the years since.

Mainstream audiences had never seen anything quite like Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands and Batman, and he continued to be a dependable and original box office success story. But the longer Burton's career has gone on, the more his movies have become predictable and formulaic - Sweeny Todd, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Alice In Wonderland, and Dark Shadows all being big-budget and visually noisy, without managing to tell their story in a way that even remotely engaged audiences. Oh, and they all featured Johnny Depp phoning in his performance from start to finish.

His continued obsession with Depp, as well as his then-wife Helena Bonham Carter, gave all his outings in the 2000s a stale and stagnant feel, with the impression of just paying to watch a group of friends mess around with a story you already know being the main thing people took away from his films. 2014's Big Eyes was a long overdue shakeup in casting and tone, but it needs to be the start of something new for Burton, rather than just a quick diversion, if he's to reestablish himself.