10 Movies That Changed Your Mind About Directors You Hated

2. Phone Booth - Joel Schumacher

If you go back to the earlier days of Joel Schumacher's career - and in particular, St Elmo's Fire, The Lost Boys and Flatliners - the suggestion that he would almost single-handedly be blamed for killing a million dollar movie franchise would have been easily dismissed. But thanks to some infamous studio meddling, Schumacher went from the success of A Time To Kill to the luminous disaster of Batman & Robin. From there, Schumacher's name was poison: at the time it wasn't clear how much Warner Bros. had pressured him into toyifying the Bat sequel and it was assumed that Schumacher had simply gone insane. And while Tigerland was a step in the right direction it wasn't until Phone Booth came out that it became obvious that he was still able to make engaging, clever movies without hyperbole or over-blown, expensive effects. Did It Last? Sadly, not. Schumacher didn't exactly scrape back to the days of Batman & Robin, but The Number 23 was wayward at best and everything else has been pretty much utterly forgettable.