7. North/Rob Reiner
From the mid-1980s through to the early 1990s, Rob Reiner enjoyed a reputation as one of Hollywood's most consistently brilliant and reliable directors, delivering a string of 7 highly-acclaimed and commercially successful features in a row -
This Is Spinal Tap, The Sure Thing, Stand by Me, The Princess Bride, When Harry Met Sally..., Misery and
A Few Good Men. That all it would take to bring his reputation crashing down was putting Bruce Willis in a bunny suit, then, is a testament to how widely loathed his 1994 follow-up,
North, really is. The stupid-good cast - including Elijah Wood, Jason Alexander, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Jon Lovitz, Alan Arkin, Dan Aykroyd, Kathy Bates, Abe Vigoda and John Ritter - could do little to stop the film's noxious momentum, as it was famously deemed by Siskel and Ebert to be 1994's worst film, and has garnered a reputation as one of the worst films of all time ever since. Ebert stated that he "hated this movie. Hated, hated, hated, hated, hated this movie." Particular attention was drawn to the skittish tone, which melded offensive jokes with a fantastical plot aimed at children. Furthermore, the film's reputation was such that it garnered six Razzie Award nominations, including Worst Picture, and Worst Director for Reiner. In addition to this, it was a box office flop, earning $7m against a $40m budget, owing somewhat to the heavy competition of
The Lion King, Forest Gump, True Lies, and
The Mask that summer, as well as the fact that, you know, it sucked. And pretty much everything he has made since has been met with a mixed-to-negative response, but most tragically, aside from his Morgan Freeman/Jack Nicholson-starring
The Bucket List, most of his films these days end up in limited release, or in the case of the UK, going straight-to-video. Recent films like
Flipped and
The Magic of Belle Isle were panned for being trite and overly treacly, and it feels like the charm that preceded North was completely obliterated in its critical and commercial wake.