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.

Andrew Stanton

The one misfire:
51 John Carter (2012)

Like the aforementioned Brad Bird, Stanton is a Pixar veteran who decided to branch out into live-action filmmaking—with much less successful results. Based on a sci-fi story by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Stanton's live-action debut John Carter became one of the biggest box office bombs of the past decade, immediately killing Stanton's plans for a trilogy. Critics felt the film had some nice visuals and was fun in moments, but was over-long, over-stuffed, and had little new to offer the genre.

Though Stanton returned to animation immediately following Carter, he recently gave live-action another try—with more successful results—by directing two episodes of Stranger Things during its second season.

Everything else:
77 A Bug's Life (1998) *
90 Finding Nemo (2003) **
95 WALL-E (2008)
77 Finding Dory (2016) †

* as co-director, with John Lasseter
** with Lee Unkrich
† with Angus MacLane

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