10 Movies Ruined By Fan Overhype

It's tough to imagine a filmmaker who has been more a victim of their own success than M. Night Shyamalan.

The shock critical and commercial popularity of The Sixth Sense netted the 29-year-old director two Oscar nominations (including Best Director), while the press ill-advisedly dubbed him "the next Spielberg."

Though his next two films, Unbreakable and Signs, couldn't replicate The Sixth Sense's mammoth success, they were nevertheless well-received by critics and fans for the most part.

The marketing for his next project, The Village, meanwhile did a remarkable job selling it as a suspense-fuelled period horror film, with many feeling that it might deliver a return to A+ form for the director.

As we all know now, that wasn't the case.

The Village certainly isn't a bad film - well-acted by a great cast, beautifully shot by Roger Deakins, and scored to Oscar-nominated success by James Newton Howard - but fans were so convinced that Shyamalan had another Sixth Sense smash hit on his hands that it could never live up to those expectations.

Sure, the third act reveal is understandably divisive, but even without that, fan expectations were so ludicrously high that there was nothing Shyamalan could ever do to live up to it.

Such is the unfortunate reality of peaking as early as Shyamalan has: he'll likely never achieve the level of popular success and acclaim of The Sixth Sense ever again.

With The Village being the first of many critical stumbles in his career since, Shyamalan has at least brought fan expectations suitably down to Earth. These days nobody expects a masterpiece from him, but rather something that's ambitious, messy, and divisive.

That's not a terrible place for a director to be, honestly.