10 Times Audiences Were Pissed Off At Film Premieres

Richard Kelly's Donnie Darko follow-up Southland Tales was one of the most hotly tipped films of the 2006 Cannes Film Festival, being unexpectedly screened at the fest in competition for its prestigious main prize, the Palme d'Or.

But Southland Tales' premiere has since become the stuff of legend, with Kelly's original 160-minute cut being excoriated by critics.

The Guardian called it "maybe one of the worst films ever presented in [Cannes] competition," while Roger Ebert deemed it the "most disastrous" Cannes screening since Vincent Gallo's infamous The Brown Bunny, which Ebert previously dubbed the worst film in Cannes history. Just last year, star Dwayne Johnson chimed in to add, "disastrous is an understatement."

The premiere screening was reportedly met with mass walkouts and loud boos, owing to both the film's bloated length and scarcely coherent narrative. Ebert said he was "dazed, confused, bewildered, bored, affronted and deafened by the boos."

Kelly later called the experience "very painful on a lot of levels," but that he "got away with murder. It's a film some people might consider an inaccessible B movie, and it's been slaughtered at the biggest film festival in the world."

Kelly was eventually allowed back into the editing room to reduce the film's runtime and complete visual effects which were unfinished for the Cannes screening, at which point the critical reception slid from outright disdain to decidedly mixed.

For better or worse, Southland Tales remains a cult curio almost 15 years later, that cataclysmic premiere be-damned.