Richard Kelly:

The idea Kelly spent the next few years after Donnie Darko going progressively more and more insane seems pretty much the only plausible explanation for Southland Tales, which has to rank as one of the most ludicrously self-centred trainwrecks in recent memory. No-one could seriously argue Kelly doesn't have talent, and here and there his sprawling magnum opus is utterly glorious. But the film comes off like some rambling, hallucinatory fever-dream without a trace of sanity to coax it into some more coherent form, from the laboured exposition of the opening sequence to the wide-eyed, apocalyptic finale. Every other line is delivered with either breathless, disconnected eagerness or grim determination and it leaves the casual viewer largely convinced Kelly went from the idea to production to the disastrous Cannes screening to subsequent re-editing while effectively out of his mind, never once stopping to think about, you know, how other people might view his baby. Surely at some point he must have stopped to wonder why things ended up going so very badly wrong?

M. Night Shyamalan:

Okay, so what with the forthcoming The Last Airbender it's entirely possible he's already admitted (at least to himself) that he's been having a little too much fun reading his own press, but still; compare the relative simplicity of The Sixth Sense to the increasingly baroque plotlines of everything that followed. Tortured moral ambiguity, divine intervention, bizarre conspiracy theories, and then in the wake of increasingly blasé critical reception (and post-Signs, declining box office) using his position to take clumsy, childish potshots at those who doubted his genius. Like Kelly, even when Shyamalan is near to scraping the bottom of the barrel he's still capable of fantastic visual and narrative invention, but it's long past time for him to calm down for a while. He's still writing Airbender, but maybe working with someone else's intellectual property might constrain his ego long enough to consider what the audience actually wants for once.

Joss Whedon:

Of course, the whole grotesque merry-go-round going on where Rupert Murdoch's flunkies attempt to systematically demolish Joss Whedon's creative spirit shows how a lot of these examples come down to the practical realities involved in getting a film or television series made at all. Whedon's far from stupid, so doubtless he considered there was every chance Dollhouse would get short shrift, like Firefly before it, come the slightest hint of anything less than mega-success. Still, if not Fox, then who? All the same, it was understandably frustrating for the writer/director's faithful to see him promising things would be different this time, then both Whedon and star Eliza Dushku urging fans to hold on in the wake of declining viewing figures for the mythical sixth episode that would turn everything around. Which to be fair, it did, somewhat - though it still took angry internet protests before Fox would greenlight a second season. Whatever brave face Joss puts on in public his ongoing relationship must surely be feeling more like a marriage of convenience than anything else by now.

Tsui Hark:

Several of the Hong Kong old guard got their fingers burnt through working with America, obviously, but at least most of them seemed to enjoy it at some point. Still, where Jon Woo and Ringo Lam managed a body of work Stateside that ranges from guilty pleasure to genuinely entertaining, Tsui Hark got saddled with Jean-Claude Van Damme twice in a row (Double Team, Knockoff) and what started out in Hong Kong as wild-eyed, scattergun genius began to seem uncomfortably like aimless lunacy in the context of the Western Friday night rental market. Hark's career behind the camera has still not quite recovered. Time and Tide was a brief reminder of his old self, but then came the disaster of Legend of Zu, and following that diminishing returns courting mainland China with Seven Swords, Missing and All About Women garnering mixed reviews at best. Fingers crossed Detective Dee might be the project to steer the master back on course, because it seems uncomfortably like Hollywood sucked out his mojo long ago, and so far a great many Chinese investors have conspicuously failed to get it back.

Vin Diesel:

I mean, you could state it any number of ways but it comes down to basically the same thing; sure, Pitch Black was a mongrel crossbreed of umpteen well-worn genre tropes but it was done with enough craftsmanship and genuine love for the material it really didn't matter, and more importantly it kept its brooding, mysterious antihero... brooding and mysterious. When follow-up The Chronicles of Riddick revealed Diesel and director David Twohy thought their creation would be better off in an extended universe that played like a head-on collision between every ghastly adolescent fanfiction cliché in the book, it felt like a stab in the back. Box-office figures bear this out to some degree and it's telling the three main spinoff properties have largely stayed far away from Furyons, Necromongers and the Underverse et al. Considering how long it's been with no sign of the third 'untitled Chronicles of Riddick project', Diesel himself must surely have wondered if Richard B. Riddick really needed a backstory in the first place.