5 Movies That Changed Your Mind About Directors You Hated

4. Phone Booth

For a little while in the early 2000s, Joel Schumacher was considered one of the worst directors on the planet. Blamed with single-handedly ruining Batman on the big screen, the director's failures transformed an entire genre, with the one shining gem in his filmography, The Lost Boys, being seen as nothing but an accidental fluke that subsequent projects all but overshadowed.

Further movies away from the superhero realm only seemed to cement his status as a hack, with the likes of The Number 23, Phantom of the Opera and the more recent Trespass bringing out the worst tendencies in the director.

While that's the general consensus though, 2002's Phone Booth proved that the filmmaker did indeed bounce back after his disastrous final Batman flick. The tense, inventive thriller was a smash hit with both fans and critics, and acted as a jumping-off point for audiences to rediscover some of Schumacher's other, similarly-enjoyable entries in the genre like Falling Down, 8MM and A Time to Kill.

Consequently, Schumacher actually has more than enough gems in his back catalogue to stop him being a total write off. Sure, he might be responsible for one of the worst comic-book movies put to celluloid, but Phone Booth proved that his talents laid elsewhere anyway.