Films that you personally think, genuinely hurt a director's career

[SymbioticFunction]

Doesn't necessarily mean a 'bad' film at all. I'll start the ball rolling, hopefully others will want to join in and participate. My choice is Neil Marshall's Doomsday from 2008 (although I was tempted to choose Michael Powell's Peeping Tom).

My take on the film - I should have loved Doomsday. The director's first low-budget film was pretty solid (Dog Soldiers) and his second film was truly AMAZING (The Descent which had a couple of nods to Carpenter masterpiece, The Thing).

Then Marshall decided to create an exploitation film that was designed to be a homage to Escape From New York, Mad Max, Excalibur and "infected"/zombie films. Sounded great on paper but viewing the final product just left a really bad taste in my mouth - it was an incredibly disappointing, far too self-indulgent mess of a movie - I saw it as a complete misfire that had badly hurt the director's cinematic career.

Marshall on Doomsday: "I do think it's going to divide audiences... I just want them to be thrilled and enthralled. I want them to be overwhelmed by the imagery they've seen. And go back and see it again." According to imdb, the Doomsday budget was an estimated $30,000,000. Worldwide, Doomsday grossed $22,211,426 according to wikipedia and it received a Rotten Tomato rating of just 49%.

Rodriguez's rather zany Planet Terror from the year before, was a much better example of that kind of film. I downloaded a copy of Marshall's 2008 film so that I could take a fresh look at it. Quality wasn't very good so I bought a cheap blu-ray copy instead - whilst I didn't think it was quite as awful as I had previously thought, I would certainly struggle to describe it as a good film. I won't be keeping it.

Dog Soldiers. 2002. Rotten Tomatoes score: 77%.

The Descent. 2005. Rotten Tomatoes score: 85%.

Doomsday. 2008. Rotten Tomatoes score: 49%.

Centurion. 2010. Rotten Tomatoes score: 59%.

After Doomsday, Marshall then received a much lower budget to make Centurion (which was nothing very special). Those Neil Marshall films were then followed by television work on shows such as Game of Thrones or Constantine.