Creator Backlash/Film

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Animated

• Richard Williams was so devastated by what happened to his masterpiece The Thief and the Cobbler that to this day, he absolutely refuses to talk about or even acknowledge the films existence to anyone.
• Disney's Robin Hood. It was considered by the company to be a piece of crap, but it was and is quite a popular film.
  • They've never been excited about The Black Cauldron either, which only occasionally pokes its head out of the Disney Vault and gets little to no mention of even existing.
  • Don't forget Disney's Song of the South, about a Reconstruction-era freed slave telling folk stories to two young white children on a plantation. Yeah, they like to pretend that did not happen.
  • Walt Disney actually claimed he disliked how the Alice in Wonderland film turned out, that Alice herself had no heart, and was glad that it failed at the box office. In fact, unlike others of his films, it would never be re-released to theaters in his lifetime. It would not get a theatrical re-release until 1974, more than twenty years after its release!
    • Which becomes Hilarious in Hindsight when Alice is a Princess of Heart in Kingdom Hearts...
  • Walt was also similarly uncomfortable with Dumbo, apparently. It was a low-budget, cartoon-like, hour-long movie that he had had very little to do with; and it ended up making more money than the high-budget, realistic, feature length films like Pinocchio, Fantasia, and Bambi that he was heavily involved in. Never mind that it was released at a time when he was trying to prove that animation was more than just cartoons (see the second Fantasia example below). According to Neal Gabler, Walt dismissed Dumbo as "just one of those little things that we knocked out between epics."
  • Although Peter Pan fared better at the box office than Alice, Walt didn't care for that film, either, claiming that the titular character was unsympathetic and unlikeable. However, unlike Alice, Walt must have been able to look past his misgivings about the film and its characters to allow Peter Pan to be re-released to theaters during his lifetime, its first theatrical reissue (there were five in all) being in 1958.
  • The Pastoral Symphony segment from Fantasia initially featured a full-on 'darky' caricature named Sunflower as one of the 'centaurettes'. She was removed in 1969 and, despite the presence of old, uncensored prints, Disney denied her existence until the release of the re-mastered edition in 2000.
    • Speaking of Fantasia, Walt Disney mentioned the film when he appeared during the 1942 Academy Awards to accept the Irving Thalberg Award. Trying to hold back tears, he said "Maybe I should have a medal for bravery. We all make mistakes. I shall now rededicate myself to my old ideals." He was ashamed of Fantasia, not so much of making the film as of its pitiful box office performance. He felt that audiences were ready for a film like that in the wake of Snow White, but when it flopped (and was right on the heels of Pinocchio being a flop), Walt's self-confidence was rattled. Fantasia's performance discouraged Walt from making anything else too artistic, which was why any films made thereafter, such as Cinderella or Peter Pan, were safer, more mainstream fare.
• Don Bluth dislikes his 90s films like Rock-a-Doodle and A Troll in Central Park as much as his fans do. In fact, he hated The Pebble and the Penguin so much that he actually removed his name from the film.
• Orson Welles, who played Unicron in Transformers: The Movie, apparently couldn't even remember what it was called, and stated that his role was that of "a huge toy that does horrible things to other toys."
  • And he died five days after completing his work on the movie. That is some rapid Creator Backlash.
• Dan Harmon, one of the screenwriters of Monster House, wrote a wonderful apology letter to a young girl after her mother, a friend of a friend, wrote him explaining the girl's nightmares over the movie, a letter in which he complained about the Executive Meddling on the movie.
  • "And next time Monster House is on, just remember that the guy that wrote it told you it was dumb."
• Peter Sallis, voice of Wallace in Wallace and Gromit stated that he preferred the original shorts such as The Wrong Trousers to the duo's big screen debut in The Curse Of The Wererabbit, making him one of the movie's few critics. Nick Park has also stated that while he holds no regrets over the movie, he feels personally that Wallace and Gromit are better suited to the short films, rather than feature-length.

Live-Action

• Jessica Alba has said that she dislikes most of the work on her resume.
• Sir Alec Guinness grew to hate the Star Wars series over time and regretted having played Obi-Wan Kenobi, because of how audiences came to only remember him for said role despite his plethora of performances in other productions beforehand. He once famously told a fan that he could have an autograph if he never watched the film again. Ironically, Star Wars made him rich, as he was the only actor able to get a cut of the gross (2%).
  • The other cast members knew how much he disliked the series while filming, and even commented that he still remained professional despite his own feelings towards the film.
  • A great many of those involved in Star Wars up to and including George Lucas came to see it (temporarily) as a noose around their necks. Lucas especially felt this way since working on the movies led to a divorce from his first wife.
• Author John Irving so hated the adaptation of his novel A Prayer for Owen Meany that he sued, successfully, to have the title character's name removed from the film—and his own name removed from the whole thing. The film was renamed Simon Birch.
• Stephen King still doesn't want to talk about the adaptation of The Lawnmower Man.
• Michael J. Fox regrets having been in Teen Wolf, which has maintained its cult popularity and even got a sequel. Fox refused to do the sequel, which caused problems because he was the title character. Ultimately, Jason Bateman was cast as a Suspiciously Similar Substitute.
• Mocked up by Kevin Smith; when a group of people announced they were going to picket his film Dogma at a theater near where he lives, Smith himself showed up and picketed the film too with a "Dogma is dogshit" sign. He ends up being filmed by a news crew as a protester, and the reporter recognized him.
  • Hilariously, Smith—who was wearing the same overcoat that his character Silent Bob wears in the movie, and using the name of his close friend and fellow protester Brian Johnson—made a point of telling the interviewer that he hadn't seen it, "but [fellow Catholics] tell him it was really, really bad," despite thinking Clerks was really funny.
  • He also famously made a mock apology for how awful Mallrats was on the official movie website just to screw with all the fans who hated it.
    • Listen to the commentary track on the Laserdisc and DVD—Smith, Ben Affleck, and Jason Mewes destroy the movie all throughout.
• The movie Galaxy Quest shows the cast of the Star Trek knock-off despising the show for both derailing all their careers and being their only means of support. Ironically, the Shatner counterpart is the only one who doesn't mind it.
  • Interesting in that in later years, the real Shatner and the rest of the cast (Nimoy especially) got over their Wangst over being typecast and hounded by fans for their characters and not themselves, and accepted how wonderful the show was to so many people.
• Gwyneth Paltrow was displeased with View From The Top and doesn't speak very positively about some of her film roles in the mid-00s.
• David Fincher doesn't talk about Alien³ and refuses to put it on his resume to this day, chiefly because he was brought onto the film late in its already troubled production cycle (which had gone through three other directors and numerous rewrites), and his vision for the final product was hampered by major Executive Meddling.
  • He seems to speak about it here, but without fondness.
  • Supposedly, he was interviewed for The Beast Within: The Making of Alien documentary, but it was all cut because he did not have a single positive thing to say.
• Joss Whedon disowned the Buffy the Vampire Slayer film for similar reasons. He launched the series to correct the errors of Executive Meddling; its pilot retconned away some events of the movie. The pilot established that it was the script version that happened when the only specifics given are that she burned down the gym at her old school.
• While we are on the subject, Joss Whedon's opinion about Alien: Resurrection is that it twisted around all the good ideas in his script.
• Faye Dunaway regrets having played Joan Crawford in Mommie Dearest and doesn't like to talk about it, either.
• Bela Lugosi had a love-hate relationship with Dracula for the rest of his life. On the one hand, typecasting destroyed his career. On the other hand, anything he had was due to Dracula, so he kept some gratitude. He was even buried in the cape, although that was the idea of his wife and son.
• Joel Schumacher has apologized for Batman and Robin in this interview.
  • Also, George Clooney highly regrets being in this film, feeling that he helped kill the franchise. One persistent, unattributed rumor is that he will give the price of admission to the film back to anybody that approaches him and says they saw it in theaters. Clooney also likes to say he played Batman gay to show his contempt for the part. Considering the context of the film...
• Tim Curry (AKA Dr. Frank N Furter) was very reluctant to talk about being in The Rocky Horror Picture Show for years, mostly due to some rather unpleasant memories involving stalkers and people digging through his trash. Since around 2000 or so, however, he's become more open to talk about being in Rocky Horror and even sees it as a "rite of passage" for teenagers. He even took the role of the Criminologist in 2016 TV movie remake.
  • Most of the main cast of RHPS at first distanced themselves from the production, only to embrace it years later. The lone hold-out is Peter Hinwood, who played Rocky, who immediately and permanently tried to pretend it never happened.
• Roland Emmerich regrets making the 1998 remake of Godzilla, but protects it all the same.
• Sean Connery on James Bond, the character that made him a star:

I've always hated that damn James Bond. I'd love to kill him.

• • Which may have helped spawn the longstanding rumor that he would play the villain in an upcoming Bond film.
  • Distancing himself from 007 is one of the main reasons he took the role of Zed in Zardoz. Needless to say, that worked beyond his wildest dreams.
  • Definitely averted now, as despite being retired, Sean Connery reprised the role of Bond for EA's video game adaptation of From Russia with Love (which he even considers his favorite Bond film), re-recording new dialogue and the like despite being more than 40 years older.
• Chevy Chase hated Caddyshack II, even during production, so much so that after a take, he mentioned to the producer to call him when a laugh track had been added, and stormed off in disgust.
• Disney has refused to release the movie Song of the South on video or DVD in the United States. This is mostly due to concerns that the film, which is based around African-American folklore, will be viewed as racist to modern eyes (although they seem fine with Peter Pan being readily available). Under current CEO Robert Iger, Disney seems to keep flip-flopping between deciding to release it and deciding to let it rest.
• Kiss refuses to even discuss their So Bad It's Good film KISS vs. the Phantom of the Park. That film is as horrifically cheesy as it sounds.
• Groucho Marx later regretted the Marx Brothers' first film The Cocoanuts, saying of its two directors, "One didn't understand English and the other didn't understand comedy."
• Alec Baldwin claims to hate his long-shelved directorial debut The Devil and Daniel Webster/Shortcut to Happiness.
• Bill Cosby hates his notorious "comedy" Leonard Part 6 as much as audiences did - possibly even more, going on numerous talk shows telling people not to see it even before it was released.
• Robert Pattinson, the male lead in the Twilight movie, has outright mentioned in interviews that he hates his character Edward and considers Stephenie Meyer insane. The female lead, Kristen Stewart, doesn't seem overly fond of the movie either, but she's less vocal about it.
• Jared Padalecki has denounced his role in New York Minute with the Olsen Twins; although he does it mostly in jest, he still said that it's the one film credit he wishes he could erase from his resume.
• Back in the 1970s, after years of making the character his own, a cheesed off and increasingly typecast Christopher Lee made a complete disconnect from Dracula.
  • It didn't help that Christopher Lee reported that Hammer Film kept him playing the role well below his actual payscale by essentially guilt-tripping him - 'you work at this pay we say or we'll have to put these crewmembers you like out of the job'. If his claims are true, no wonder he hated the role.
• Orlando Bloom, while never outright complaining about or bashing his Pirates of the Caribbean character Will Turner, has made it bluntly clear that he wants nothing more to do with the character. Keira Knightley seems to share a similar disposition towards Elizabeth Swann. Predictably, both have stated that they will not return in On Stranger Tides (and they didn't). Though apparently, their dispositions toward their characters stem not from the characters themselves, but the romance story that took over the trilogy.
  • It appears that Bloom has since had a change of heart.
• The real Patch Adams has publicly expressed his disdain for the movie based on his life.
• The movie Field of Dreams has the character of Terence Mann (James Earl Jones) who just wants to be left alone by the fans of his writing.
  • Terence Mann is said to be inspired by the life of reclusive author J.D. Salinger. Salinger is the author sought by the main character in Shoeless Joe, the novel the film is based on. Salinger became reclusive after critics panned Nine Stories, his short story anthology published after The Catcher in the Rye.
• Mark Romanek, director of the award-winning psychological thriller One Hour Photo, has refused to release his directorial debut Static (a quirky black comedy reminiscent of David Lynch) on DVD. He has expressed that, while he does not actually dislike the film, he considers it a "sophomore attempt" that does not stand up well when compared with his more recent work; and is best forgotten. This is exacerbated by the film's seriously Downer Ending.
• Megan Fox has a history of badmouthing the director and franchise that made her famous, Michael Bay and Transformers.
  • Though she's certainly not the only one who feels that way, as Shia LaBeouf has mentioned that he wasn't too fond of Revenge Of The Fallen himself, claiming that the film made no sense to him (or anyone else for that matter), and Bay definitely has a real talent for pissing people off, as several actors and actresses including Scarlett Johansson, Kate Beckinsale (who claimed that Bay made her feel "ugly" on the set), and Bruce Willis have all said in one way or another that they would never work with Bay again.
  • Even Michael Bay himself apologised for Revenge of the Fallen.
• In her Razzie acceptance speech for Worst Actress, Halle Berry called Catwoman an "awful, piece of shit movie." And the crowd went wild.
• Sylvester Stallone is not fond in retrospect of his various attempts to stretch into comedy, famously calling Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot "the worst movie ever made in our solar system, including alien productions we have never seen."
  • Stallone has also expressed distaste towards Rocky IV and V, and to a lesser extent Rocky III. He said that if he could make Rocky IV again he would have hired Bill Conti to score it (this is the only film of the series to have been scored by someone else - Vince DiCola, if you're wondering) and would have punched Brigitte Nielsen in the face.
  • He also deeply regretted Rhinestone but did enjoy working with Dolly Parton nevertheless.
• Many of Peter Sellers' early 1970s efforts, when his star had fallen far enough he was willing to do just about anything, qualify as this in one way or another. He tried to prevent the release of 1970's Hoffman and badmouthed 1972's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland before it opened. In fact, he called his 1965 through mid-1970s output a "bad patch" to Time magazine not long before his death. Sellers was infamous for being overly self-critical of his work, though - the truly shameful work didn't kick in until the '70s. (And Hoffman is surprisingly popular with the more devoted fans.)
• John Wayne aggressively campaigned to be cast as Genghis Khan in The Conqueror. He would later shudder at the mention of the movie and claimed the moral of the story was "not to make an ass of yourself trying to play parts you're not suited for."
  • This movie did have a very good, and tragic, reason to be regretted; it was shot in Nevada near an atomic test site, and many of the cast and crew (including director Dick Powell, co-star Susan Hayward, and Wayne himself) were later stricken with cancer - studio owner Howard Hughes was so devastated he took the film out of circulation.
• Fritz Lang came to dislike his best-known film, the sci-fi epic Metropolis, called it "silly" and "ridiculous" in interviews, and tried to draw attention to his favorite film M instead. There were many reasons for this: the heavy Executive Meddling by distributors who cut a quarter of the film's footage (Lang died believing that a full cut no longer existed), reports that it was Adolf Hitler's favorite film (especially bitter since Lang was half-Jewish, and emigrated from Germany in 1934 to get away from the Nazis ), and that the plot was a little silly (and was written by his ex-wife, whom he divorced over political and creative differences). Not to mention that it overshadowed the other three decades of his long film career.
• Mike Judge hated Office Space for several years after its release. Due to insane amounts of Executive Meddling and lousy marketing, he had trouble watching it again without those memories popping up. He said that he never watched the whole movie again for many years until his daughter asked to watch it. Recently, though, he's felt a bit more positive about the film.
• Could count as Old Shame too: J. D. Shapiro, the original screenwriter of Battlefield Earth, was fired from the film because Executive Meddling wanted to change his script too much, and he didn't want to - considering the end result of the changes, a wise choice. Shapiro even wanted to remove his name from the credits, and shows his disgust (and Self-Deprecation) by both receiving the Razzies of the film (the one for Worst Screenplay in a radio program, and the one for Worst Picture of the Decade at the actual ceremony!), and posting an apology letter, which included the line "The only time I saw the movie was at the premiere, which was one too many times".
• Much like the Bela Lugosi example above, Orson Welles had a love/hate relationship with Citizen Kane, leaning often towards the latter, as he considered his later works The Trial and Chimes at Midnight to be much better. Of course, this is in large part due to the fact that after it was voted the Best Film Ever Made multiple times, Citizen Kane became the only thing anybody wanted to talk to him about.
  • It's also likely because, despite its historical acclaim, the film failed to win a Best Picture Oscar and Wells didn't win Best Actor for it. It also wasn't much of a financial success (largely due to William Randolph Hearst's smear campaign), which led to RKO Pictures prematurely terminating his contract.
• Babylon A.D. was hit with this before it even came out. The director, Matthieu Kassovitz, has been quite open about how his initial vision of a dark but thoughtful cyberpunk world was edited beyond all recognition and turned into "a bad episode of 24." (For context, Rotten Tomatoes rates this movie at 7% freshness.)
• Reportedly, the second Asterix movie suffered from this. The owners of the franchise decided that the movie wasn't Asterix-ish enough, so they dropped all the elements they didn't like for the third movie. Unfortunately for them, said third film was a spectacular failure, while the one they didn't like is still the most critically and commercially successful of all three movies.
• Jerry Lewis to this day refuses to talk in any great detail about his unreleased film The Day the Clown Cried, a WWII comedy (with heavy tragic elements) about an inept German clown who is sent to a concentration camp and who, feeling unaccepted by the people on his side of the fence, decides to entertain the Jewish prisoners. Few people have ever seen the film, and Lewis apparently keeps his own VHS copy locked away for good.
• Paul Verhoeven disowned Showgirls after Joe Eszterhas the film's writer edited the film without his permission. When the film won its numerous Razzie Awards, he accepted them to show his hatred of the film.
• Hoo boy, Caligula. Writer Gore Vidal walked away from production because he hated how director Tinto Brass wanted satire in the film. Brass was then cut loose because producer Bob Guccione wanted hardcore sex involving his Penthouse Pets. Neither Vidal or Brass are officially credited in their roles. Most of the actors now look upon it as an Old Shame due to its reputation as a high-budget porno; Anneka Di Lorenzo eventually won a lawsuit claiming the film damaged her career (though the punitive damages were overturned on appeal).
• Harlan Ellison has made it very clear that he is not a fan of The Oscar, which to this day remains his only feature screenwriting credit.
• Screenwriter Mike White disowned School of Rock after the director decided to play up gay stereotypes without his involvement. Being bisexual and with a gay father, White was not pleased when he saw the final product.
• William Gibson has distanced himself from the film adaptation of his short story Johnny Mnemonic, for which he wrote the screenplay, claiming that Executive Meddling turned what he and director Robert Longo had envisioned as a more experimental, independent film into a mainstream, generic sci-fi action movie.
• The Farrelly Brothers disowned the film Outside Providence (co-written by them and based on a book by Peter Farrelly) after producer Harvey Weinstein insisted on numerous changes from the source material and recut the film in order to make it closer to their There's Something About Mary rather than the coming-of-age tale the original story was. The final film was a flop with critics and audiences and has been more or less forgotten.
• Michael Moore does not like the film Slacker Uprising, which was a documentary that he only did to complete a three-film deal with producer Harvey Weinstein. He even personally bought the rights to the film so Weinstein would never release it theatrically and chose to premiere it for free online.
  • His dislike may have more to do with the fact that even a lot of his staunchest supporters were calling the film ridiculously self-indulgent and an exercise in worshiping himself even before it came out, considering that it was a "documentary" of a series of events he hosted himself. It was basically even more blatant as "Look How Great I Am!: A Michael Moore Documentary, By Michael Moore, Starring Michael Moore" than usual, and everyone and their sister called him on it.
• Wes Craven has disowned a pair of movies in his career. He disowned The Hills Have Eyes Part II as he only made the film for the money and felt the story ended with the first movie (he later co-wrote the sequel to the remake though, which may have been him feeling what he could have done to make it better). Many years later, he disowned Scream 4 due to the constant Executive Meddling the film suffered and the amount of rewrites and reshoots done on the film. He has hinted making a fifth film though.
  • Vampire in Brooklyn is also not one of Craven's favourite films (or star Eddie Murphy's).
• Jim Sheridan has come out and disowned Dream House after the film's producer locked him out of the editing room after reshoots where done (which were done after the film tested poorly). It is not known what Sheridan's original cut was like.
  • As stars Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz refused to do any promotion for the film, it's safe to say they aren't too fond of it either.
• Please, please, please don't mention The Exorcist to Linda Blair. It's not so much the movie itself that she despises, it's the fact that 40+ years later it's the only thing people ever talk about around her. Especially don't speak of the power of Christ, nor whether or not it compels you.
• Michael Biehn disowned The Blood Bond, a film he starred in and co-directed, after its nightmarish production and being fired as soon as filming ended (as the film's writer felt it was his movie and not Biehn's). Biehn's voice was also dubbed and he was horrified when he saw the released version.
• In-Universe in American Dreamer, the writer of the Rebecca Ryan books has his mother claim to write them, as he feels the books are just pulp trash.
• Mickey Rourke severely dissed A Prayer For The Dying before its release (he said making it was "a nightmare"), and director Mike Hodges tried to take his name off the credits; needless to say, both have disowned it.
• "Fictional" example, Jem and The Holograms was such a bad movie that one critic decided to get a bunch of friends to cosplay the characters from the original cartoon to review it - Jem's initial reaction being, "What the **** was that?. Watch the whole review here. Biggest irony? Most viewers who rated the 5-minute low budget video claim it's more entertaining than the movie was.

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