1. Heaven's Gate/Michael Cimino
Though Shyamalan's disgraceful late-day career might seem impossible to top, the lesser-known tale of
The Deer Hunter director Michael Cimino takes the cake, if only because it demonstrates the extent to which a terrible film can not only affect a filmmaker's future prospects, but their past work also. Cimino's 1978 masterpiece about the Vietnam war ended up being nominated for 9 Academy Awards, taking home 5, including Best Picture, and for Cimino, Best Director. Two years later, his reputation would be tarnished irreparably. Cimino's 1980 film
Heaven's Gate never really had a chance to resonate with viewers first, as it was savaged even during early production stages for exceeding its budget and time deadlines, and also being directed with a certain haphazardness by Cimino. The film was eventually released to a reception befitting this sort of hubbub, scarcely earning $3m against a $44m budget, making it one of cinema's most colossal box office bombs, and helping give it a reputation as one of the worst films ever made. It is frequently criticised as being too long, and at the time was heavily controversial for its perceived abuse of animals during production. Cimino's film was such a failure, in fact, that it helped bring studio United Artists to their knees, while at the same time ruining the director's momentum as a filmmaker on the rise after his breakout success in 1978. The film's bombing also had far wider implications, forever altering the model with which films are made, moving far away from a system that places control and trust in the hands of the director, and instead opting for a safer, more studio-regulated one, with only a few exceptions. Infamous set stories include Cimino wanting to surpass the 1 million feet of film shot by Francis Ford Coppola on
Apocalypse Now (which he did, shooting 1.3 million), and waiting an extraordinary amount of time for a cloud he liked to roll into shot. Also, Cimino's deliberate approach meant that some musicians who travelled to the set for three weeks ended up stranded there for 6 months, and many have claimed that the colossal production budget was boosted by rampant drug use on set. In post-production, Cimino locked executives out of the editing room, maniacally convinced that he was working on a masterpiece, unveiling a 219-minute cut at the film's premiere that was universally reviled. Subsequently, none of Cimino's films have been critically or commercially successful; 1985's
Year of the Dragon was nominated for 5 Razzie awards, including Worst Picture, and then Worst Director for Cimino, while
The Sicilian, Desperate Hours and
Sunchaser all bombed at the box office. Most astoundingly, though, the nuclear effect of Heaven's Gate was such that some critics who had praised The Deer Hunter even turned to question that acclaim, and so Cimino's legacy has been forever tainted. Michael Cimino has not directed a film in 16 years. But are there any we missed? What other directors have famously flopped?