Fallen Creator/Film


 * George Lucas wasn't always the divisive figure he is today. When he started out his career, American Graffiti earned him critical success and several Oscar nominations for making such a groundbreaking film. Then, of course came Star Wars, which revitalized the science fiction genre and turned into a landmark film and franchise that, to this day, remains very near and dear to the hearts of many, not to mention Oscar nominations for him personally and the movie. Despite a few missteps in the '80s that briefly rendered him under this trope, he made his mark again with Indiana Jones, another series of critical and fan darlings that still endure.

However, much of his success during this period was the result of him getting a number of friends (including future critically-acclaimed filmmakers Francis Ford Coppola, Brian De Palma, and Steven Spielberg) to read them and offer advice concerning which ideas worked and which didn't. It's also been said that in the original Star Wars trilogy, especially A New Hope, bad lines were ad-libbed over by the actors (Harrison Ford is on record saying to Lucas while filming A New Hope that he "could type this shit... but you sure as hell can't say it"). As time went on, he stopped asking his friends for help (it didn't help that some of them became Fallen Creators themselves, while Spielberg was insanely busy in his own right), his works were rarely vetted by anyone other than himself, and seemed to borrow more from his own previously rejected ideas.

The results of having nobody to cover up his weaknesses were predictable. Starting in The Nineties, his prestige as a fandom idol began to take swift hits due to multiple different Star Wars recuts with some controversial changes, the mixed-reception to the Star Wars prequels that swiftly divided a once relatively united fanbase, and his long-delayed return to Indiana Jones receiving a lukewarm response at best (it was actually widely acclaimed by critics, though the fan base is much more divided).

Today, Lucas is just as likely to be reviled as he is to be praised. He still has no trouble finding an audience to see his movies (even the new Indy was a commercial success), but a sign of his decline is the usually negative reaction a Star Wars spin-off receives whenever his involvement is revealed and the likelihood that a review is going to start calling out the usual flaws in his work.
 * It's worth remembering, though, that unlike most of the people on this page, Lucas apparently doesn't take the criticism personally, and has notably poked fun at Jar Jar's terrible rep on The Colbert Report and acknowledging how badly he mishandled Howard the Duck. This doesn't excuse his missteps, mind, but it does make the Broken Base more broken for it: it's harder to hate the man himself since he's not being a dick, he's just screwing up.
 * Lucas also took criticism well enough to slowly decrease and then effectively eliminate Jar Jar from the prequels after the character turned out to be not so big of a hit. Jar Jar's last role as a substitution for Amidala in the Senate also had far less of the annoying childishness he had displayed in Phantom Menace and toned him down significantly, even his speech patterns. That he actually listened to the fans in that case is pretty notable.
 * And now he might start becoming a Woobie. How else can you feel for the guy if he says that he's afraid to make any more movies for fear of being yelled at all the time and being called a terrible person?
 * And not so much anymore. A mere one week after the Tear Jerker complaint, he's back to his old ways of trying to prove that he's always right and that the fans are wrong.
 * YMMV, but to be fair given the fact that most of these fans continue to bash him, continue to insist that they're right and rejoiced when he retired, they arguably deserve this.
 * Ivan Reitman used to be a well-respected Hollywood director that first broke out into fame by directing Meat Balls and is best known for being the man behind Ghostbusters, as well as several successful comedies like Stripes, Twins, Kindergarten Cop, and Dave. However, after many huge flops following the release of Dave, his cred dropped considerably, to the point where even the critics began to openly dread his screen credit. My Super Ex-Girlfriend, for instance, had a critic in Newsday asking "... why was it made? ... And, most important, why is there 10 bucks missing from my pocket?" He did claw some respectability back in 2011 with No Strings Attached, which got decent reviews and topped the box office in its first weekend, but he still faces a lot of work if he's ever going to fully restore his reputation.
 * At least his legacy lives on with his son Jason, who may possibly have a stronger career than his father. Jason now holds four Oscar nominations for his work on Up in the Air and Juno.
 * Between the three of them, the trio of "Zucker Abrahams Zucker" (affectionately nicknamed "ZAZ") did Kentucky Fried Movie, Airplane!!, Police Squad!!, and The Naked Gun. They started splitting up after the first Naked Gun film and separately, all three of them have declined into this trope. Jerry Zucker's last film was the critically panned and mostly forgotten Rat Race, after which he appears to have retired entirely, Jim Abrahams and David Zucker are stuck with Scary Movie 4, and David Zucker had the high-profile flop An American Carol (an Anvilicious parody whose protagonist was a Strawman Political Michael Moore Expy). That last one notably tried to play up his earlier success from Airplane!!, which caused the few critics that actually saw it (it wasn't screened for critics) to remark on how terrible it was in comparison to his earlier movies and how unfunny he has been since.
 * Kevin Costner fell victim to this. His Academy Award for Dances with Wolves earned him immense critical acclaim for his directing and acting, and Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, The Untouchables, and The Bodyguard were big hits if not critical faves. But then a series of flops (or at least expensive underperformers), most famously Waterworld and The Postman, led to him not even receiving promotional billing on his films out of fear that just mentioning his involvement could doom a project. He has since recovered somewhat by focusing on more careful, lower-key projects such as The Guardian and the superb Mr. Brooks.
 * M. Night Shyamalan may be the fastest example of this happening in the history of film. After his exceedingly awesome debut, The Sixth Sense, his movies continued to rely on a thin pattern of obligatory but telegraphed twist endings and characters awkwardly bonding in forced situations. This might have not even done him in if not for his huge ego that constantly riled at his critics, and increasingly more important Self-Insert/Mary Sue parts for himself in each of his films. Once regarded as "the next Alfred Hitchcock", he's become a joke about twist endings and The Sixth Sense is generally regarded as a lucky fluke. The only successes he had after that film were Unbreakable, which had good critical reviews, and Signs, which had lukewarm critical reviews but good box office numbers. Everything after this point was one flop after another, leading to the self-indulgent mess of Lady in the Water and the widely loathed Film of the Series The Last Airbender. Movies he's worked on since have seen his creative control decrease and his involvement heavily downplayed.
 * John Landis, the director of Animal House, The Blues Brothers, An American Werewolf in London, Trading Places and the video for Michael Jackson's "Thriller", suffered one of the grislier disgraces on this list. While he was filming a segment for the Twilight Zone anthology movie, a special effect went wrong, and a crashing helicopter killed actor Vic Morrow and two illegally employed child actors. Landis shook off criminal charges in a highly publicized court case, but the accident was a serious blow to Landis's career.

In spite of this, he still made fairly successful movies for most of the '80s, and had a major hit with Coming to America. What really derailed his career totally was the over-budget, out of control production of Beverly Hills Cop III, and the subsequent flop of The Blues Brothers 2000 pretty much confirmed the kill. He then retreated to documentaries, a field in which he hasn't declined yet (he won an Emmy in 2008 for Mr. Warmth: The Don Rickles Project), and is only now getting back into making feature films.
 * What really makes the Twilight Zone part bad, though, is that it was entirely his fault. He ignored the advice of stunt men and actors alike, demanding the helicopter get closer in each shot so it'd look better. Morrow, in contrast, earned a Dying Moment of Awesome by pushing some of the child actors out of harm's way at the cost of his own life.
 * Another writer-director who took a fall was Blake Edwards. He established himself in the late 1950s/early '60s with Breakfast at Tiffany's, Days of Wine and Roses, The Pink Panther series, etc. He hit rough waters later (the biggest flop of his being Darling Lili), but the Pink Panther series revival in 1975 brought him back around, and his non-Panther films (especially "10" and Victor/Victoria) were well-received too. He even managed to write and direct a thinly fictionalized Take That to Hollywood (S.O.B.) for his earlier treatment during this period. Then Peter Sellers, who played Inspector Clouseau in the Panthers, died—and Edwards made Trail of... using outtakes and flashbacks of Sellers, and Curse of... using a Replacement Scrappy. Critics were appalled, Edwards and United Artists were sued by Sellers' widow over Trail, and both were box-office underachievers. Edwards made a lot of movies over the next ten years, but to diminishing returns, to the point that MST3K once made a joke where a "brainwashing" machine says "Blake Edwards makes a really good film..." He did receive an Honorary Oscar in 2004, though.
 * Peter Sellers himself was this for a time. In 1964, he was arguably the most acclaimed comic actor in the world. But then he suffered a series of heart attacks. While his first post-attack film, What's New Pussycat, was a hit, After the Fox was a disappointment, and his behavior on the set of Casino Royale was so infamous that the producer and Columbia Pictures blamed him for many, if not most, of its problems. His difficult nature and disappointing films made him almost Deader Than Disco (particularly with American studios) until the Pink Panther revival and Being There turned things around, an example of how the fallen can be redeemed. He looked to be on the verge of throwing it all away again with 1980's disastrous The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu, but in a piece of incredibly good timing, he died a month before it was released.
 * Rob Reiner was a force to be reckoned with as a director in the 1980s-'90s: This Is Spinal Tap, The Princess Bride, Stand by Me, When Harry Met Sally..., Misery, A Few Good Men... and then he made North in 1994, and its box-office and especially critical failure, with only 1995's The American President and 2007's The Bucket List being a comparable success since.
 * The "New Hollywood" era is littered with the corpses of great directors. First, a quick history lesson: New Hollywood was an era that started in the mid-1960s with the release of edgy films (Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate) made by young film school directors who shook up the Hollywood studio system (and killed off what was left of it in the process) and earned massive amounts of money and critical acclaim. As The Sixties and The Seventies went on, directors were given carte blanche for their projects and/or struck out into independent production companies to gain more creative control. Eventually, though, success got to these directors' heads, their films started going from masterpieces to self-indulgent messes, and they fell hard and fast from their lofty perches. Among the most notorious examples:
 * Francis Ford Coppola. He brought the world The Godfather saga and Apocalypse Now in the 1970s. Then the disaster One from the Heart came along, and since then his filmography has largely been a big string of commercial and/or critical disappointments (one of the few bright spots is Bram Stoker's Dracula). He has admitted that he did Jack and several other of his more recent films simply to avoid bankruptcy. His daughter Sofia has taken a cue from him however and become a director, making films such as The Virgin Suicides, Lost in Translation and Marie Antoinette.
 * Michael Cimino went from The Deer Hunter, the Best Picture Oscar winner of 1978, to Heaven's Gate just two years later. Its failure was so catastrophic that, as noted at Genre Turning Point, it ruined United Artists as a stand-alone studio and turned Hollywood off the Western for a decade or more. A while later, Paramount signed Cimino to direct Footloose, but when filming was to have started he demanded more time and money from the producers, who fired him. He hasn't worked much since (though has recently taken up novel-writing.)
 * The career of William Friedkin, director of The French Connection and The Exorcist, never really recovered after Sorcerer, in spite of its positive reception from critics, flopped at the box office on release in 1977. (It didn't help that it was completely overshadowed by a little film which came out right around the same time...). Add his reputation as a Bad Boss Prima Donna Director...
 * Hal Ashby, after creating classics such as Harold and Maude, Coming Home, Shampoo, and Being There, made a string of critical and commercial failures in the '80s, ruining his reputation, until he couldn't find work anymore. He was dogged by rumors that he'd become an unreliably eccentric drug casualty, but a recent biography (Being Hal Ashby by Nick Dawson) suggests that this was mostly malicious gossip spread in retaliation for his fighting back against Executive Meddling. Ashby smoked epic amounts of weed and loved his booze, but it was his workaholic and perfectionist tendencies and unwillingness to compromise that really hurt his reputation in Hollywood. He died from cancer in 1988 just as he was starting to make a comeback.
 * Robert Altman began the 1970s with the success of Mash in 1970 and Nashville in 1975, two films which epitomised New Hollywood, and had influence far beyond their box office take. He then spent the rest of his directorial career falling and rising and falling again in twenty-year cycles. His work in the rest of the 1970s left the box office cold, and eventually turned off the critics; several of his films from the late 1970s and early 1980s remain unavailable on DVD as of 2010. He began the 80s with a disastrous musical version of Popeye starring Robin Williams, and was forced to work in television for a while, until The Player and Short Cuts in 1992 and 1993 rehabilitated him; he threw it away with 1994's Pret-a-Porter, but seemed to be coming back into fashion when he died in 2006.
 * Peter Bogdanovich was compared to Orson Welles with The Last Picture Show, and succeeded it with the successful comedy What's Up, Doc? and the equally acclaimed Paper Moon. It all went downhill from there, with the negative reception of Daisy Miller and Nickelodeon being the decisive points (1985's M.A.S.K. being his sole bright spot afterwards).
 * Subverted by Martin Scorsese, who had his own potentially career-ending Protection From Editors-related bomb (the musical New York New York) and drug-related meltdown in the late 1970s, but managed to claw his way back from it with Raging Bull, which was critically acclaimed if not necessarily commercially successful. His early 1980s movies (The King of Comedy, After Hours, etc) were generally respectable even if they didn't set the world on fire, but The Last Temptation of Christ and Goodfellas fully restored his reputation as one of America's best directors.
 * Tom Cruise is a pretty severe self-inflicted case of this. During the '80s and '90s, he was a renowned, charismatic movie star, but that changed over the course of the 2000s as he started acting increasingly unbalanced in public. Things did not seem so bad at first, but once he became the latest "Current Main Face of Scientology in Hollywood" things (and, seemingly, Cruise) went off the deep end. He became more known for some of his infamous stunts (particularly the notorious "couch jumping incident" on The Oprah Winfrey Show) and, more seriously, his embracing and promoting of Scientology's hard-line approach to mental illness and psychiatry. He nabbed some particularly bad publicity after suggesting that actress Brooke Shields, who had revealed the depths of her battle with postpartum depression, "just needed vitamins". His diva antics on the set of Mission Impossible 3, the film's astronomical budget, and the demand that Scientology be permitted to set up tents on all filming sites, did not go over well with Paramount either. Though the film somehow survived the box office (mostly it was J.J. Abrams and Philip Seymour Hoffman), his reputation didn't. It remains to be seen whether Cruise can ever reclaim his mega-stardom instead of just being known as a couch-jumping nutcase.
 * Cruise seems to have regained a modicum of respect after Playing Against Type gloriously in Tropic Thunder, but that was a small-ish role for a star like him. His own production from UA (which he bought after Paramount dumped him) was flop after flop.
 * Even a little before Tropic Thunder, he started taking a few good roles (he got some critical love for Valkyrie), and went more moderate on the Scientology angle.
 * Though its star is still fallen, as the mild reception of Knight and Day proved (to be fair, he was considered by many of the critics to be the best thing in the movie). Let's see if the fourth Mission: Impossible truly saves him.
 * The critical reception of both his performance and the movie so far has been unanimously positive, so he could very well be on his way to a Career Resurrection.
 * Writer/director John Hughes was the man who practically defined 1980s pop cinema. He hit it big right out of the gate with his teen-oriented smash-hits like Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Ferris Buellers Day Off, and Pretty in Pink. He hit a plateau with Planes, Trains and Automobiles and began a slow slide downward with mediocre but more dramatic films like Some Kind of Wonderful. He had his last major success with Home Alone and its sequel, before bombing with a string of lowbrow flops in the '90s, including Curly Sue, Baby's Day Out, the So Okay It's Average Home Alone 3, and a major holiday flop with his Miracle on 34th Street remake; his biggest hits were the live-action One Hundred and One Dalmatians and Flubber, the remake of classic Disney film The Absent Minded Professor. Flubber was a critical disaster, but still financially successful. After 2001, he wrote scripts for the direct-to-video Beethoven sequels and a couple minor hits (Maid in Manhattan and Drillbit Taylor) under the pseudonym of "Edmond Dantes" until his death in 2009.
 * Kevin Smith looked to be heading this way after Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back flopped and Jersey Girl was loathed even by his die-hard fans (his statements that the film wasn't for critics didn't help either). He seems to have recovered with the more successful Clerks II.
 * And despite the again-lackluster box office returns, Zack and Miri Make a Porno was critically well-received. However, Cop Out, the first film which he directed but did not write, was critically panned. This, together with the now-infamous "airline incident" that occurred shortly before the release of Cop Out (which, although he was totally screwed over by the airline, he managed to handle the situation very poorly), has led to Smith's reputation plummeting spectacularly among film fans. Although it remains to be seen whether Smith has well and truly squandered his loyal fanbase, these two incidents (particularly the airline incident) have clearly caused irreparable damage to his reputation.
 * His next film, Red State, could make up for those incidents as it is a return to his writer/director roots and features a a fairly strong cast. However, it is a horror/thriller type movie, a genre he has never before dabbled in. Only time will tell.
 * Smith has recently gotten in the news for another incident over the film rights of Red State. After a bizarre introduction featuring Wayne Gretzky's stick and lots of profanity, he held an auction in which he stopped it after submitting his own bid for $20 and announced he would self-distribute. After this display of egotism, many distributors were angry and have possibly severed ties with the director.
 * Smith also dabbles in the occasional writing of comic books over at DC & Marvel, where his stuff was already controversial. His most recent project, Batman: Widening Gyre, was already receiving low reviews when Smith wrote out a scene where Batman flashes back to his confrontation of the crime bosses in the mansion during Batman: Year One. Said scene "revealed" that when Batman used explosives to blow open a wall, the shock made him.... soil himself in his costume. What little respect people had for the book instantly vanished after that.
 * It also didn't help that he wrote a scene where The Joker raped Harley Quinn. First of all The Joker is about as sexually aggressive as turnip in literally every incarnation, second it shows that he understands the character even less than Tim Burton and third why the hell would you think this would remotely make sense?
 * Meanwhile, over at Marvel, he penned Daredevil for a time - a run that included killing over steady girlfriend Karen Page and villain Mysterio. The latter is particularly irksome because Mysterio is a long-time Spider-Man villain and his motivation for going after Daredevil was never very clear. Marvel editors have since admitted that they didn't rein in Smith like they would've for other writers. Also, his Spider-Man/Black Cat miniseries, which suffered from severe Schedule Slip. It was originally a four-parter, but it took several years for Part 4 to come out. (And by that time, the mini was given a couple extra parts - most likely to justify the long wait.) And by the time it wrapped, the book was also not well-received because it retconned Black Cat's backstory so that she took up a life of theft because she was unable to kill the guy who raped her in college.
 * Stephen Herek established himself as a big name director during the 80's and early 90's. Among his big hits were Bill and Teds Excellent Adventure, The Mighty Ducks, and The Three Musketeers 1993. That all changed in 2005, however, when he directed Man Of The House. Slammed by critics and audiences alike, Herek has since been stuck to directing Direct to Video movies, such as the sequels to Into The Blue and The Cutting Edge.
 * Woody Allen is a multi-talented actor, director, writer, and musician. (For example, he holds the record for most Academy Award nominations for Best Screenplay—fourteen.) First becoming famous as a stand-up comic in the 1960s, he went on to major film successes like Sleeper, Bananas, Annie Hall, Manhattan, and Hannah And Her Sisters (among others) in the '70s and '80s. His films began to decline in prestige and commercial success in the 1990s; in fact audiences favoring his "early, funny" films were already a problem for him in The Eighties. Unfortunately, he also had a massive scandal in his personal life that overshadowed much of his earlier work—an affair with his long-time lover Mia Farrow's adopted daughter, Soon-Yi. Because he had known the girl since she was seven, it didn't matter very much that she was 22 at the time they married and that she was a legal adult when the relationship is believed to have begun, thus dogging him with jokes about pedophilia ever since. This ended his relationship with Farrow and also estranged him from one of their biological children in the aftermath. It didn't help that the real-life scandal caused audiences and critics to be more judgmental about his tendency to romantically pair his characters in films with ones played by very young actresses, although he's far from the only Hollywood offender there. Allen's films continued to decline, with several massive flops in the late '90s and 2000s, with minor bright spots in 2005's Match Point, 2008's Vicky Cristina Barcelona and 2011's Midnight in Paris. While he is prolific, with at least one new film each year since 1982, his glory days appear to be well behind him.
 * It doesn't help that Woody Allen came out and supported Roman Polanski after the famous director was arrested for drugging and raping a thirteen year-old girl.
 * Speaking of Roman Polanski, while still generally acknowledged as a gifted artist, when he raped a thirteen year old girl and fled the country, a lot of people were appalled. It was, however, an extremely complex situation which also involved allegations of judicial misconduct, and there are many people who are going to reserve judgment until he actually comes back to America and faces the courts, as well as some die-hard fans who don't care. AND THAT IS ALL WE WILL SAY ABOUT THE CASE.
 * And now with the emergence of a certain petition, a lot of actors and directors might get this from their fans.
 * Even before the incident a lot of critics felt that Polanski had betrayed the promise of his earlier films and had been riding on his reputation for a while. While Chinatown was universally praised, Polanski only joined the project well into its development. His other early '70s movies (Macbeth, What?, The Tenant) were mostly commercial and critical flops.
 * Guy Ritchie's first film Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels was an indie success and critical darling for its fresh, vibrant style. He followed up with Snatch, which was an even bigger success, but some critics complained that he was rehashing his previous film too much. In response, he remade Swept Away, and everyone hated it. When he returned to familiar territory with the crime caper Revolver, he tried to mix things up with a Xanatos Gambit and an Anvilicious Aesop. The film was so poorly received that it didn't even see wide release in America. Ritchie then made RocknRolla in an obvious attempt to recapture the violent and irreverent underworld hijinks of his first two films. By this point, people seemed to have lost interest in his original style and the film tanked. His adaptation of Sherlock Holmes appears to have revived his fortunes, at least for now; it received mostly positive reviews, and was successful at the box office, grossing more than all of his previous films combined.
 * Fred Dekker directed two of the most well-known cult classics of the 1980s: The Monster Squad and Night Of The Creeps. In 1991, he took on the job of writing the screenplay for and directing the much-maligned sequel RoboCop 3, effectively killing the Robocop franchise in the U.S. for several years. Dekker stayed out of the limelight, and only stepped out of hiding more than a decade later to help produce the first season of Star Trek: Enterprise.
 * Lindsay Lohan had a decent start to her film career with remakes of The Parent Trap and Freaky Friday, and seemed poised to transition well to young adult stardom with Mean Girls and A Prairie Home Companion. Immediately afterward her reputation tanked hard thanks to drug addiction and numerous car crashes, plus a publicized letter during the making of Georgia Rule about her frequently showing up late to the set thanks to going out partying the night before. After seeming to hit rock bottom with the universally panned I Know Who Killed Me, Lohan went through rehab and publicly stated that she let success go to her head and she would try to maintain a better public image from now on. Then came her recurring role on Ugly Betty, where she reportedly acted like such a diva on set that the storyline was heavily rewritten just to get rid of her, though there are conflicting reports that say she left the show due to Creative Differences over the way her character was handled. A comeback was apparent when she was cast as Linda Lovelace in the upcoming biopic film Inferno, but she later dropped out of the film. Now in 2012 things are finally beginning to look up for her, she hosted Saturday Night Live for the fourth time, and though reactions to her performance were mixed, it wound up being the highest rated SNL episode of the season (not counting the special with Peyton Manning), and now she has a guest apperance on Glee and is currently scheduled to play Elizabeth Taylor in a Lifetime biopic Liz And Dick.
 * Joel Schumacher had some acclaimed films in The Eighties and The Nineties, such as The Lost Boys, St. Elmo's Fire, and Falling Down. Yet when he's the director chosen by Warner Bros to turn Batman Lighter and Softer... while Batman Forever made some money while dividing people, the dreadful Batman and Robin led him to picking lower budget films, most of which were failures (the critically acclaimed Tigerland and the critical and commercial hit Phone Booth being exceptions). The next big-budget film he directed, The Phantom of the Opera, met with popular approval, but critics denounced it as overproduced and badly directed. (The film was nominated for three Academy Awards, but not for Best Director or Best Picture.) It is too soon to tell if the Nicolas Cage/Nicole Kidman thriller Trespass will restore his career after such forgettable flops as The Number 23 and Twelve (but sinceTrespass got a video-on-demand release the same day as its (very) limited theatrical release and hit cinemas with a DVD date already set, probably not).
 * Director Tod Browning had a string of successful silent-film collaborations with Lon Chaney, and helmed the seminal talkie vampire film Dracula, but after the initial disaster of Freaks, it was all downhill. However, Freaks has become Vindicated by History and is now considered an underrated classic.
 * The Wachowskis have been lurching dangerously towards this status over the last few years. After a modest start with Bound (which didn't do all that well at the box office but performed pretty nicely in the VHS market, no doubt due to the volume of Les Yay it featured) they hit it big with The Matrix, which many acclaimed for "revolutionizing" the action genre. Since then, it's been a gradual downwards slope. The Matrix Reloaded did pretty well at the box office, but there was a nagging feeling among viewers that it should have been a lot better, and later that year The Matrix Revolutions was widely slammed as being nigh-incomprehensible as well as being a poor conclusion to the series, and did only moderately well at the box office. V for Vendetta saw a brief return to form (although they didn't direct it), but since then it's been downhill all the way, as they helped to produce a butchered re-edit of The Invasion, had a major money loser with Speed Racer and their most recent production, Ninja Assassin sank without a trace at the box office. Reports of their next film being a "hard-R gay love story" between an Iraq war soldier and an Iraqi likely won't help gain fans back.
 * To their credit, with Ninja Assassin, most critics liked the fight sequences but panned the plot (if you can call it that), which the Wachowskis didn't write. J. Michael Straczynski admitted that he was on a tight timeline and finished the script in less than three days.
 * They may be on the way to a Career Resurrection, with their adaption of Cloud Atlas attracting big-name talent like Tom Hanks.
 * And Speed Racer is starting to become Vindicated by History, as some who now view the film see it as groundbreaking and underrated, so the Wachowski's might not be done for just yet.
 * In The Nineties, Robin Williams (having built himself up from being just a stand-up comedian / sitcom star) was one of the most beloved comedic actors. He was doing it all: Adult comedies, kids' films, a few dramas here and there. And for one film in that last category, Good Will Hunting, he won an Oscar. And then he made Patch Adams, which wasn't even a bad movie, but many people were turned off by the combination of overly-zany humor and saccharine drama, and many also believed that the other doctors in the film were right. From then on, many television shows viewed him as a kind of walking punchline rather than the jokester. People started to focus on his less-than-stellar career choices like RV, License To Wed, and Old Dogs while ignoring his better output such as House Of D, The Big White and World's Greatest Dad (it doesn't help that the former three are major studio films while the latter three are from independent studios). The exceptions are films like Insomnia & One Hour Photo where he plays the villain.
 * Williams has regained some measure of respect by returning to his roots with a number of well-recieved stand up specials.
 * Former Disney CEO Michael Eisner is often remembered now as a talentless, soul-sucking hack that "destroyed" the company built by Walt and Roy O. Disney. Few remember that the company had nearly been destroyed by Ron Miller's inept leadership in the early '80s, and that Eisner was brought in by Roy E. Disney after the first "Save Disney" campaign in 1984. Eisner took Disney to the major market force that exists today—returning it to higher-budget films, creating the Touchstone division for adult-oriented material, and pushing for the much-lauded Disney Renaissance that revived animated films after the false start of The Black Cauldron. He believed in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and brought new interest to the golden age of animation, while getting Disney into television animation (resulting in DuckTales (1987), Darkwing Duck, Tale Spin, Gargoyles, etc.). But when Disney's president Frank Wells died in a helicopter crash just before the release of The Lion King in 1994, long-time studio chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg expected to be promoted to fill Wells' position. When Eisner refused and forced Katzenberg to resign, he left the studio to found DreamWorks, whose animation arm became a major competitor to Disney's. The promotion of Eisner's friend Michael Ovitz to the position was a disaster that upset most of the shareholders—even more so when he left the company with a $38 million dollar severance. Disney's new films, shows, and theme parks began to tank one after another in the late '90s and early 2000s—accused of becoming formulaic, obsessed with The Merch, and in the case of the parks outright lazy and cheap, while the old animated films were hit hard by Direct to Video Sequelitis. Eisner burned enough bridges that even Pixar was ready to end their long partnership. In the wake of this, Roy E. Disney resigned from the board of directors and started a second "Save Disney" campaign to get rid of Eisner, who resigned under extreme pressure in 2005. It wasn't all doom and gloom for both Disney and Eisner though—Disney under Bob Iger is slowly recovering, having rebuilt the bridges with Pixar and drawing positive attention from the public with three particular projects, while Eisner's guest-hosting stint on The Charlie Rose Show not long after his ouster led to him getting a regular talk-show on CNBC; he continues to expand into Internet production and he bought the Topps baseball company.
 * Eisner was famous for being a control freak. Jerry Bruckheimer initially brought the CSI franchise to ABC/Disney and Eisner rejected him. Eisner also reportedly hated Lost and wanted it canceled despite its success. Reports from the inside even say that Eisner was hard set against both Lost and Desperate Housewives, which were immense hits for ABC in 2004... while pushing his own project, which was basically "Stacy's Mom" by Fountains of Wayne as a sitcom.
 * Sean Connery had a stellar career through all the 1960s, '70s and '80s, and time seemed to make him only better. However, after the successes of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and The Hunt for Red October, his career started to slide. He still got some critical and/or commercial successes like The Rock and Finding Forrester, but his last movies were mostly disappointments, and made him to be perceived as way past his glory days. Some unfortunate choices made things worse: he declined to play Gandalf, while choosing to do things like The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. After that movie, he retired. Sad way to go out with a whiz instead of a bang.
 * To say he 'had a stellar career through all the '60s, '70s, and '80s' is to paint things a little rosier than they were. While he was in two hit films during the '70s, they were the All-Star Cast Murder on the Orient Express and A Bridge Too Far, he was also in Zardoz and had lots of trouble getting work by the 80s. He was then in the adaptation of The Name of the Rose for very little money, but it proved to be his comeback. That same year he did Highlander and the next he won his only Academy Award for The Untouchables.
 * Roland Joffe received Best Director Oscar nominations for his first two movies, The Killing Fields and The Mission. It's all been downhill from there, leading to him directing widely-panned torture porn film Captivity (with Elisha Cuthbert) in 2007.
 * Nicolas Roeg, director and cinematographer, was the guiding force behind sci-fi landmark The Man Who Fell to Earth, Walkabout (on the Roger Ebert Great Movies List), and Don't Look Now (also on the list and voted the eighteenth best film by Times). Yes indeed, The Seventies were an amazing time for him. His films in the eighties were largely overlooked, and in The Nineties was making movies like the straight-to-cable, soft-core erotic film Full Body Massage with Mimi Rogers and Bryan Brown.
 * After Signs, Mel Gibson decided to take a break from acting and focus on directing, eventually making the controversial but successful The Passion of the Christ and Apocalypto. But then his personal life made him a very hated person, with allegations of antisemitism and racism, and arrests for DUI and domestic violence. In 2010, he attempted an acting comeback with Edge of Darkness, which flopped. And then came the release of a series of recorded phone conversations with his ex-girlfriend, in which his lunatic behavior seems to have been cranked Up to Eleven. It's probably safe to say he'll never fully recover from this; he got kicked out of a cameo in The Hangover 2 after Zach Galifianakis raised holy hell, and The Beaver flopped despite being one of the most acclaimed unproduced scripts from the last couple decades. To make it worse, despite a promising trailer, his next movie, the domestic debut of his next movie, Get the Gringo, will not be theatrical, but on Directv's video-on-demand.
 * National Lampoon made a name for itself as a humor magazine spun off from the Harvard Lampoon. Their first film, Animal House, was an American classic and a huge box office success. The National Lampoon name was a valuable commodity, and they licensed it out to other films. The success of the Vacation series only added to their clout. Then the magazine fell hard from its '70s peak, and they have since attached their name to a string of low-budget "teens behaving badly" productions: Senior Trip, Dorm Daze, and Van Wilder are relative highlights.
 * In the late '80s and early '90s, Luc Besson was an internationally acclaimed filmmaker whose movies The Big Blue, La Femme Nikita, Léon: The Professional and The Fifth Element continue to be popular with audiences and critics alike. Then he started focusing more on producing and writing increasingly panned French action movies such as the Taxi franchise, as well as anglophone movies that, while enjoying a certain amount of success overseas, were either ignored or panned by French critics. Today, in spite of his recent successes with the adaptations of his own Arthur and the Invisibles trilogy, he is dismissed by most French critics as a once-talented sellout who writes and produces loud, dumb and cliché-ridden action movies.
 * John McTiernan was one of the biggest action directors of the late 1980s and early '90s with films such as Die Hard, Predator, and The Hunt for Red October. It was pretty hit or miss after that with Medicine Man and Last Action Hero both underperforming and getting mixed reviews. McTiernan made "good again" by returning to direct the third Die Hard film in 1995. Unfortunately, this was followed by the massive financial flop that was The 13th Warrior. The remake of The Thomas Crown Affair was McTiernan's last "real" hit. What followed was extremely harshly recieved (not only financially, but critically) remake of Rollerball. McTiernan's next film (and his final film to date), Basic, despite the presence of John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson also received mostly negative reviews. After that, McTiernan was in the news more for his criminal conviction in the Anthony Pellicano wiretapping scandal than for his movies.
 * Molly Ringwald was arguably the queen of coming of age high school/teen films in the 1980s with Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club and Pretty in Pink. However, her relationship with writer/director John Hughes ended on a sour note when she turned down Lea Thompson's role in Some Kind of Wonderful. Also, by the end of the '80s and start of the 1990s, Ringwald turned down roles that would prove to be star making roles for Meg Ryan (When Harry Met Sally...), Julia Roberts (Pretty Woman), and fellow Brat Packer Demi Moore (Ghost). For pretty much, a good share of the '90s, Ringwald spent time in France only resurfacing for the short-lived ABC sitcom Townies (co-starring a pre-Dharma and Greg Jenna Elfman and pre-Gilmore Girls Lauren Graham). Ringwald however, would poke fun at her iconic high school movie status with a cameo in the 2001 film Not Another Teen Movie. Ringwald is perhaps most known these days for her role on the considerably Anvilicious Narmfest on ABC Family called The Secret Life of the American Teenager.
 * Richard Linklater was a critical darling and high in-demand director of films such as Dazed and Confused, The School Of Rock, Waking Life and Slacker and looked to be one who could never make a bad movie. Then he did an adaptation of the non-fiction book Fast Food Nation, changed the entire point of the book and turned it into one long Author Tract against eating meat. The film was a critical and box office disaster and Linklater has since had trouble getting distributors for his films.
 * Robert Zemeckis has fallen victim of this as of early 2011 with the spectacular failure of Mars Needs Moms. It's too early to tell if it may grind the performance capture movies Zemeckis was a champion of to a temporary halt (October's Tintin was a big success critically and commercially), but in the meantime, it has led to the closure of his studio. At least, this may prompt him to return to "traditional" movies...
 * He is going to be shooting Flight with Denzel Washington later this year so a Career Resurrection is very likely.
 * Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Burt Reynolds was one of the biggest movie stars in the world. However, by the start of the 1990s, he seemed to be more in the news for his personal life (such as his messy divorce from Loni Anderson and having to file for bankruptcy) than for his acting. Around this period, Reynolds transitioned himself into being a television star with the B.L. Stryker TV movies for ABC and the sitcom Evening Shade for CBS. Reynolds would resurface in the critically bashed buddy movie Cop & a Half. It wasn't until Reynolds' Oscar nominated turn in Boogie Nights that Reynolds regained some respectability, but even that didn't last too long.
 * Japanese directors Hideo Nakata and Takashi Shimizu were internationally acclaimed for their forays in the J-horror genre (Ringu for Nakata, Ju-on for Shimizu). Their acclaim was so good that they came to the United States to remake their own films. Nakata's The Ring Two made money but was critically panned (mostly for retreading the remake of the first film's events) and Nakata has struggled to gain back his momentum (a recent attempt at a comeback with Chatroom was a critical and commercial disaster). Shimizu's first American film The Grudge was a hit but its sequel was badly received and became a Creator Killer for him and its star, Amber Tamblyn. Nearly all of his post-The Grudge 2 projects have been complete disasters.
 * Vincent Gallo is an arguable example. After making a career as a supporting actor in films like The Funeral, he made his acclaimed directorial debut Buffalo 66. Then he made his infamous follow up The Brown Bunny, which led him to an unsuccessful war of words with critic Roger Ebert, who had previously supported his career. Since then, he has mostly been in tabloids for his extremely bizarre behaviour (e.g. trying to put a hex on Ebert), his truly venomous personality (e.g. criticizing Christina Ricci for her weight, unprovoked four years after working with her), his own claims of genius, and his vitriolic verbal tirades (e.g. calling Francis Ford Coppola "a fat pig", Sofia Coppola "a parasite" and Martin Scorsese "an egomaniac has been, who hasn't made a good film in twenty-five years"). While he still has a sizeable fanbase, even his most ardent supporters have come to accept that he is an unfortunate case of talent undone by ego. Nowadays, he is more likely to be known for inspiring the character of pretentious jerkass Billy Walsh in Entourage.
 * John Singleton started his career out with a bang with Boyz N the Hood, which was a box office hit and got him Academy Award nominations for Best Original Screenplay and Best Director (he was the youngest to be nominated for the latter). After a number of acclaimed films in the 1990s, the changing box office climate in the 2000s made Singleton a dinosaur and forced him into making for-hire projects such as 2 Fast 2 Furious. One of the big reasons for his downfall was that Paramount apparently screwed him over after he made a deal with them for Hustle And Flow, basically they promised him two independent films, but they made it all but impossible for those films to get made. The bottom fell out in 2007 when he was in a car accident that caused him to accidentally kill a man (he was acquitted though), which led him to become a pariah in Hollywood. His first post-accident project was the critically mauled Abduction. At this point, it's looking like he will never reach the fame and glory of his early days.
 * In film scoring, Hans Zimmer protege Klaus Badelt was a rising star in film scoring with his work in action films such as The Time Machine and Equilibrium, with his high point being the score in Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. Then a pair of high-profile flops (Catwoman and Poseidon) combined with the reveal that the majority of the Pirates of the Caribbean was really the work of Zimmer (Badelt simply taking credit) irrepairably destroyed his career. He's still around but as a lower-tier composer in Zimmer's canon, scoring mostly little-seen indies and straight-to-DVD films.
 * Warren Beatty was once a renowned actor/director, but that all changed when he made Town And Country which was both a Box Office Bomb and a flop with critics, the behind-the-scenes drama of the film (Beatty insisting on doing re-shoots of almost every scene, causing the film's budget to swell from 40 million to 80 million, quite a large amount for a romantic comedy) didn't help him either.
 * Ironically, at the start of the 1990s, Beatty had somewhat of a Career Resurrection with Dick Tracy (the most commercially successful film of his career) after the previous biggest flop of his career in 1987's Ishtar.
 * Spike Lee spent much of his career as a polarizing but successful director in Hollywood whose films usually tended to be well-reviewed and topical. Even when he missed, he still managed to recover with the next film. But the breaking point came in 2008 when his film Miracle At St Anna flopped and his Small Name, Big Ego became too much to handle for others (he had gotten in the news some time before its release criticizing Clint Eastwood for not featuring any black characters in Flags of our Fathers when Eastwood was simply abiding by historical fact). Since then, Lee has mostly spent his time in television and documentaries but will likely never get the stature he once had in Hollywood and with audiences (Pariah, which he produced was acclaimed but little-seen while Red Hook Summer, which he directed was badly received at Sundance and did not get a distribution deal).
 * Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle was one of the top film comedian/director/producers in the beginning of the Golden Age of Hollywood. After a scandal in 1921 where a woman died of kidney failure at a party Arbuckle held, and (unsubstantiated) rumors kindled by the press formed that Arbuckle raped the girl while she was unconscious, crushing her under his weight, his good-guy image fell hard. Arbuckle, even while acquitted in court, had to resort to working under pseudonyms as a movie director for the rest of his life. He, nor his career ever fully recovered from the rumors, and the scandal was reportedly one of the catalysts of the passing of the Hays Code.
 * Following her breakthrough role in When Harry Met Sally..., Meg Ryan starred in a string of successful romantic comedies and dramas over the course of the 1990s (perhaps most notably, her three films with Tom Hanks, the latter two, Sleepless in Seattle and You've Got Mail both grossed over $100 million at the domestic box office). However, Ryan's reported affair with her Proof of Life co-star Russell Crowe (while Ryan was still married albeit, separated to Dennis Quaid) did serious harm to Ryan's "good girl", "America's Sweetheart" image. Ryan gained further negative publicity while appearing on the UK talk show Parkinson while promoting the erotic thriller (and decidedly against type role) In the Cut. Ryan gave a few one-word answers, and after she acknowledged that she wasn't comfortable with the interview Michael Parkinson asked her what she would do if she were in his position now. She replied that she would "just wrap it up". Parkinson later revealed to the press that he felt her behaviour to his earlier guests, Trinny Woodall and Susannah Constantine, whom she turned her back on, was "unforgivable". Ryan also commented that Parkinson was a "nut" and said that she was "offended" by him as he was like a "disapproving father" in his tone. Ryan's arguably ill-advised cosmetic procedures (which further diminished her Girl Next Door appeal) also served as a major blow to her career. Following the 2004 boxing drama Against the Ropes (which flopped at the box office and was panned by critics for baring too much of a resemblance to other boxing movies, such as the Rocky series), Ryan didn't appear in another movie for three years. Ryan would resurface in the independent movie In the Land of Women and the direct-to-DVD movies The Deal and Mom's New Boyfriend. Ryan's next major theatrically released film, 2008's The Women received significant negative response from critics and holds only a 13% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Ryan herself would also be nominated for a Worst Actress Razzie (alongside co-stars Annette Bening, Eva Mendes, Jada Pinkett Smith, and Debra Messing).