Night Shyamalan's Rotten Tomatoes scores are going in one direction: Straight down

How bad are things going for Night Shyamalan, who was once such a celebrated young filmmaker that Time magazine put him on the cover, knighting him as the next Steven Spielberg? If you made a graph of the Rotten Tomatoes scores for all his films, as the website Marginal Revolution has done, the graph shows his scores (with one exception) going in only one direction--down, down, down.

Shyamalan started out as a critics' darling, earning an 86 for "The Sixth Sense," a still respectable 67 for "Unbreakable, then an uptick to 74 for "Signs."  But then the downward curve accelerated. "The Village" got a 43. "Lady in the Water" ended up with a lowly 24. "The Happening" had a paltry 18 while Shyamalan's new film, "The Last Airbender," hit the bottom of the barrel, scoring an 8 with critics (although it has already made more than $100 million at the box office, something his last couple of films couldn't do).

Marginal Revolution asks a provocative question: "Has any recent director begun with greater promise or had a worse trajectory of achievement?" Can anyone out there offer some names that fit that bill? Guy Ritchie looked like he was going in the same direction until he rebounded with "Sherlock Holmes." Would Kevin Smith be a worthy candidate? Or how about Sam Mendes?

This seems to happen in every walk of life, where early success and stardom ends up trailing off into hackdom. If you look away from the multiplexes and toward Dodger Stadium, you could put a similar spotlight on Manny Ramirez, the underperforming Dodgers left fielder who put up Hall of Fame numbers with the Red Sox but has been in a tailspin in recent years. If you knock out his brief resurgence in 2008 (a resurgence that may well have been fueled by illegal substances, which eventually earned him a drug-related suspension), Ramirez's home run numbers, starting with 2005, have been 45, 35, 20, 19 and 8 so far this year. Since he's on the DL again, I'm betting Manny doesn't beat last year's power numbers, which would give him a Shyamalan-esque downward trajectory.

Of course, Manny may simply be getting old. Shyamalan is still in his directing prime, so age is no excuse. He could still make a comeback--after all, when you've earned an 8 at Rotten Tomatoes for your last film, you have nowhere to go but up. But it's hard to think of any filmmaker who, in terms of the quality of his films, has traveled any faster from the cinematic penthouse to the outhouse. (A tip of the cap to my colleague Ben Fritz for steering the graph my way.)

Photo: Night Shyamalan at an opening of "The Last Airbender" in Berlin earlier this month. Credit: Britta Pederson / European Pressphoto Agency

 

Comments

[Ron]

I remember that Time issue when he was compared to Spielberg. I thought it was completely ridiculous at the time. The guy made one decent film in "The Sixth Sense" and all of a sudden he's this great director? That article was complete garbage and way off base. I've seen all his movies, and they have been incredibly disappointing to say the least, with each one getting worse and worse. Of course, Shyamalan likes to boast all his movies have made a profit, except for Lady in the Water, but his name alone on a film causes many moviegoers to avoid it, knowing they will be let down once again by the lack of imagination and creativity.

[Louweegie272]

Is this article trying to say that Night used PED's on "The Sixth Sense"?

[ryn]

things arent going to get any better for him. i went to see a movie this weekend and when the trailer for his newest film "Devil" was shown in a theater, a huge wave of laughs and boos arose when his name was shown on the screen. everyone realizes his movies are crap and i really wish he would quit getting such big budget deals when there are so many directors with actual talent out there

[Doug]

This is what happens when you have a megahit as a writer. Suddenly you know everything and you don't listen to people, or you don't rewrite like you should, and pretty soon you're blaming everyone in interviews instead of blaming yourself. And Hollywood continues to let this guy write and direct because the average producer/studio head can't tell the difference between a great script and crap. Heck, Disney sold off 88% of The Sixth Sense because after viewing, the execs thought it would bomb.

[Bradford Talamon]

Have you considered the fact that a film that makes $100 million is something that the public likes instead of your self-annointed critics?

Maybe the problem is that your critics like self-indulgent garbage that the public doesn't...and which usually results in commercial flops.

[Stump Barnes]

Patrick,

Before you put so much faith in Rotten Tomatoes you should go to the website and read how they gin up their ratings. Basically, their system is designed to maximize negative ratings. If a reviewer doesn't definitively state a "thumbs up" rating or give it "4 out of 5 stars" or some other obviously endorsement, the film is assigned a Rotten Tomato.

So for reviewers that don't assign a quantifiable rating or choose to write nuanced reviews that discuss both the positives and negatives of a film, Rotten Tomatoes will unilaterally coded those reviews as Rotten Tomatoes. For a non-quantifiable review to not be coded a Rotten Tomato, the review has to essentially be over-the-top effusive and contain a specific recommendation that readers go out and see the film.

Obviously, this system works okay for amateurish fanboy reviewers that have flooded the Internet. However, you can see how this system would also exaggerate a films negative reviews. If this review is positive to mixed, in the world of Rotten Tomatoes its awful. There are a lot of films that enjoyed seeing that fall into this category, but I would not have seen if I was going by Rotten Tomatoes.

Overall, I think Rotten Tomatoes does more harm than good with it's rigged, binary rating system.

And, no I'm not defending "The Last Airbender."

[Nobody]

Martin Brest went from 96% and 94% on Midnight Run and Scent of a Woman to 50% with Meet Joe Black and then 6% with Gigli.

[Todd]

Regarding Manny Ramirez, you left out the fact he hit 37 home runs in 2008 with the Red Sox and Dodgers. Also, last year's 50 game suspension plus 3 trips to the DL this year would undoubtedly hurt any player's statsitics. No pun intended, but any comparison between Shyamalan and Ramirez is truly out of left field.

[filmjeff]

After the first couple of films, I referred to him as M. Night Charlatan because he'd really duped both the public and the studios with his terrible concepts for movies. At least "Sixth Sense" was well executed. After the trashing of his last four films, I finally got up the courage to go see "Last Airbender," to witness just how bad it had gotten. There wasn't a single moment of the film that made any sense, not one scene that was memorable (except for how disjointed), not one performance that was anything but amateurish. MNS was exposed as a director who not only could not connect to that material, he failed to make any of the scenes connect with any other. His new moniker for me is "M. Non Sequitur."

[Quiet Fan]

The guy made a good movie (The Sixth Sense), and we can't take that away from him. But since then, his movies should all be named "UNWATCHABLE". My vocabulary fails me in my attempt to describe just how bad his movies are. What a waste of time.