4. Heaven's Gate (1980)
When The Deer Hunter become the huge success that it did back in the late 1970s, writer/director Michael Cimino insisted that western Heaven's Gate be his follow-up. United Artists, desperate to nab this wunderkind filmmaker in the aftermath of his glory, agreed to make the picture - what they didn't know at the time, of course, was that doing so would put an end to both their studio and Cimino's career. In the wake of its notoriously excessive production helmed by an auteur gone mad with power, Heaven's Gate has since become a synonym for disaster. Cimino believed that he could do whatever he wanted in the wake of The Deer Hunter's: Heaven's Gate, then, is a textbook example of a director trying way too hard for reasons unbeknownst to anyone - it wasn't okay for Cimino to make a great film, he set out to make a masterpiece, which - as everyone knows - is impossible to premeditate. The director insisted every detail of the movie was tweaked to his liking, and as the budget swelled, so did his ego. Alas, the end result is a strange and misunderstood movie, panned upon original release, but better appreciated nowadays. But there's no excuse for how hard Cimino pushed this film at the time.