8 Filmmakers Who Were Pissed Off By Movie Critics

5. Dan Fogelman Thinks That Movie Critics Hate Emotion

Life Itself
Amazon Studios

Dan Fogelman has worked on some truly beloved films over the last ten years, including Me And Earl And The Dying Girl, Tangled, and Crazy, Stupid, Love. But in terms of the features that he's directed? Things have been decidedly mixed.

Fogelman has helmed two movies to date: 2015's Danny Collins, and 2018's Life Itself. The former was received quite well, with a 77% score on Rotten Tomatoes, but the latter sank like a brick, and currently sits at a terrible 14%. Ouch.

Fogelman probably expected Life Itself to do a little bit better - especially considering the positivity surrounding Danny Collins - and in a 2018 interview, he expressed his frustration with the critics who had given his latest work a bad score, accusing them of becoming "increasingly cynical and vitriolic".

Fogelman also took shots at "white male critics who don't like anything that has any emotion", stating that he feels like critics always attack certain genres and ideas. Presumably, he's referring to the soppy and romantic stuff, even though plenty of movies in that genre receive critical acclaim, awards buzz, and box-office gold.

Life Itself, on the other hand, just wasn't good enough.

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Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!