10 Great Movies That Inadvertently Ruined Cinema

8. Heaven's Gate Changed The Way Movies Were Made Forever & Marked The Death Of Independent, Auteur-Driven Films

Heaven's Gate has become synonymous as the one of the largest cinematic disasters in motion picture history; after its budget soared four times its original size, director Michael Cimino - fresh off of The Deer Hunter - refused to give in to United Artists, who were both bewildered by and at the mercy of this wunderkind genius who would stop at nothing to realise his "perfect vision."

When the movie flopped at the box office, barely grossing anything at all, United Artists went bankrupt and were forced to close. Other studios took note: something really had to change. And it did. After the colossal failure of Heaven's Gate, major movie studios stopped letting their directors run wild and took control.

No longer would they allow the likes of Francis Ford Coppola to disappear with large amounts of money, dictating productions from afar - everybody was reined in on account of Michael Cimino's screw-up. And the great, independently-minded films that made the '70s such a great decade for cinema and auteurs alike vanished, which - in retrospect - proved a huge loss. Heaven's Gate paved the way for generic, executive-led crap.