25 Misfires From Otherwise Great Film Directors

by Jason Dietz, Metacritic Features Editor – April 22, 2018

Last week, we looked at 30 filmmakers who made only one well-reviewed movie over their entire careers. Today, we examine the opposite group: directors who have nearly flawless careers, with only a single misfire (with a Metascore of 60 or lower) standing in the way of a perfect record of all-green scores.

Note that we only looked at directors who have made at least five films since 1980.

11 of 26

David Fincher

The one misfire:
59 Alien 3 (1992)

One of the top music video and commercial directors of the 1980s, David Fincher made the jump to feature film directing (as a last-minute replacement for another filmmaker) with the third film in the Alien series. The film, which even Fincher dismisses, was plagued by numerous problems before and during production, and was labeled by some reviewers as a mess. It remains the only one of the six Alien films not to have a green Metascore (not including AvP spinoff films).

Fincher was so displeased by the process that he gave up on film for a few years. But, upon returning, he reeled off nine consecutive positively reviewed films. In the last few years, the director has focused his efforts on television with his hit Netflix shows House of Cards and Mindhunter.

Everything else:
65 Seven (1995)
61 The Game (1997)
66 Fight Club (1999)
65 Panic Room (2002)
78 Zodiac (2007)
70 The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008)
95 The Social Network (2010)
71 The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011)
79 Gone Girl (2014)

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