Magnum Opus Dissonance / Live-Action Films

Examples of Magnum Opus Dissonance in live-action films.

• Orson Welles' most well-known and celebrated film by far (if not the only film of his many people can name) is Citizen Kane, but he believed that his greatest completed film was either Chimes at Midnight or The Trial. Many people react with shock when they do some checking and realize that Citizen Kane did not win Best Picture at the Oscars, or indeed that Welles himself never won Best Director or had a film win Best Picture, with Welles sharing the Best Screenplay Oscar with Herman J. Mankiewicz.
• Carol Reed was a legendary British filmmaker, known for thrillers like Odd Man Out, The Fallen Idol and The Third Man. He never won an Oscar until he went against type and directed Oliver!, a colourful, family-friendly musical based on the Dickens novel Oliver Twist that hardly features a single tense, dangerous moment.
• This is something of a recurring narrative in the New Hollywood era of the 1970s, with numerous directors agreeing to do studio pictures in order to get the funding for the more personal pictures that they wanted to make. The studio pictures, which were usually made under some level of studio observation (however minor), would go on to be widely acclaimed as great films, whereas the more personal pictures — usually made under an atmosphere of Protection from Editors and the director's ego (and in some cases personal life/problems) having spiralled completely out of control — would bomb disastrously.
• The Western Heaven's Gate was the passion project of Michael Cimino, director of the acclaimed Vietnam War movie The Deer Hunter. It's considered one of the biggest bombs in film history; it ended Cimino's career and the New Hollywood era. Some consider it to have been Vindicated by History; it has a strong vocal audience today, to the point where restored re-releases have received great reviews.
• Most of the Monty Python crew (John Cleese in particular) consider Monty Python's Life of Brian to be their greatest work, in part because it has a central theme and tells a complete story, while their other works are more or less a series of sketches. Monty Python's Life of Brian is still very popular with Python fans, many of whom consider it to be the superior film, but Monty Python and the Holy Grail has penetrated pop culture to a far greater degree (to the chagrin of the creators, who have lingering bad memories of its Troubled Production).
• Star Wars:
  • George Lucas put a lot of work into the series, but he always intended to use the money it raised to work on the smaller, more personal projects that had brought him fame, such as American Graffiti and THX 1138. Many years and billions of dollars later, the smaller, more personal projects did get made (but with different directors), in the form of Radioland Murders (1994) and Red Tails (2012).
  • Lucas has stated that one of the reasons he keeps going back and tinkering with the initial Star Wars trilogy is that he was never happy with the final product and that the newer versions are what he always envisioned. Fan reception, on the other hand, is strongly in favor of the originals.
  • Sir Alec Guinness had a long and varied career, first on stage where he held his own against Laurence Olivier, then in a film career filled with tour de force performances that culminated in his own personal favorite, Adolf Hitler in The Last Ten Days (a proto-Downfall, if you will). So what film is Guinness best known for? A sci-fi quickie he lambasted as "fairy-tale rubbish".
  • While Mark Hamill has been unwavering in his love of the franchise and pride in working on it, he has a withering opinion of his own performance in the original trilogy, to point he's stated on Twitter he hasn't watched the films since their Updated Re-release in The '90s and only because his kids wanted to see them.
  • While Han Solo is often considered the best character Harrison Ford ever played, Ford himself said he didn't find Han terribly interesting, and only agreed to reprise the role in The Force Awakens knowing that he would be killed off. In contrast, Ford loves playing Indiana Jones and will play him for as long as he is able to, reprising the role at 78 years old for Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.
• Ask people what Alfred Hitchcock's best movie was, and you'll get different answers. Maybe Psycho, maybe Vertigo, maybe North By Northwest or Rear Window. Most probably won't mention the film Hitchcock regarded as his favorite, 1943's Shadow of a Doubt.
• Frank Langella considers Masters of the Universe his favorite role of all, despite the film's less-than-stellar reception. He also enjoyed Cutthroat Island, a box office bomb, another favorite of his since he always wanted to play a pirate.
• Dennis Hopper's attempt to follow Easy Rider with an ambitious project he was conceiving for a while, The Last Movie, bombed so hard that it prevented Hopper from directing again for nearly a decade.
• Leo McCarey directed two movies of 1937: the light comedy The Awful Truth and the cynical drama Make Way for Tomorrow. When he received the Best Director award for The Awful Truth, he said that he'd been awarded for the wrong movie. That said Make Way for Tomorrow is highly prized and rated by cinephiles and film-makers like John Ford, Jean Renoir, and Errol Morris.
• Out of all the actors to play Batman, Val Kilmer has never been very well-received. Many loved Michael Keaton and hated George Clooney but were really just indifferent to Kilmer, finding him dull. Despite this, Bob Kane considered Kilmer to be the best actor to play Batman. (Kane is widely reviled throughout the comics industry and fandom for stealing credit for creating Batman from Bill Finger and others though, so this is probably not the best indicator of quality.)
• Roberto Benigni has stated in several interviews that he wanted to do his version of Pinocchio (2002) since he was a child. It was only after the success of Life Is Beautiful that he was given the freedom to pursue this project, which was poorly received.
• Sucker Punch was a pet project of Zack Snyder that he worked on for years. However, the final movie bombed at the box office and was panned by critics as his worst movie whereas his previous live-action movies were critically praised.
• Rob Reiner made North with the hopes that it would be his own equivalent to The Wizard of Oz. It wasn't. And to add insult to injury, many pointed out he'd already made such a movie several years earlier.
• Paul Verhoeven has stated that science fiction is not his favorite genre. Ironically, his most popular movies, RoboCop (1987) (a film he almost turned down), Total Recall (1990) and Starship Troopers, are science fiction, while his non-sci-fi movies have either been largely forgotten, or lambasted.
• Marlon Brando has stated his personal favorite movie that he worked on was Burn!. The film was a commercial failure when it originally came out. Later on in his career, despite garnering critical acclaim for his performance as Don Vito Corleone in The Godfather, he turned down his Oscar and didn't attend the ceremony.
• Crossing with This Is Going to Be Huge: Fox joined forces with Arthur P. Jacobs on Doctor Dolittle, considering that the best-seller adaptation would be the start of a new franchise. It was a wretched Troubled Production that caused a heart attack on Jacobs, and upon release was badly received by audiences and critics alike. But as Jacobs finished the movie, Fox accepted to green-light an adaptation of a science fiction novel he had the rights to given he kept the budget low. The result was Planet of the Apes, the first of a Cash-Cow Franchise.
• M. Night Shyamalan thought that The Last Airbender would be his greatest work and bring him back up to his once great director status. All those Razzie Awards, critics, and fans of the animated series beg to differ, and the film instead ended up as the biggest flop in a series of poorly-received films that essentially torched Shyamalan's career. It took until the release of The Visit, the first season of Wayward Pines and Split before his reputation was restored.
• Stanley Kubrick regarded Eyes Wide Shut his finest contribution to cinema. This is one of his only films that hasn't been Vindicated by History.
• Georges Méliès insisted that A Trip to the Moon was by no means his greatest achievement, saying he was proudest of a serious, deliberately depressing historical film called Humanity Through the Ages. Still, the former became an international success, contributed an iconic image to the history of film, and is still regarded as one of the most historically significant films of all time.
• Woody Allen has stated he feels his films have only continued to improve as the years have passed, with the ones he puts out now being far better than his earlier work, a view most critics and many fans find difficult to agree with.^note For example, he considers Match Point one of his best works, whereas veteran film critic Philip French of the UK Observer called it "extremely disappointing", criticizing the complete lack of humor, the "clumsy, lumbering dialogue" and Allen's lack of knowledge of the milieu he was writing about. Allen has also expressed confusion with the underwhelming response to his film Hollywood Ending, which despite his usually withering opinion of his own work, he sees as one of his funniest films. He did, however, agree with the negative response to The Curse of the Jade Scorpion.
  • Allen has stated that Annie Hall is not his favorite creation, but Stardust Memories is. Fans have long come around to love the latter, but still think the former is his best film, if not Manhattan.
• With regard to his acting career, Ronald Reagan considered his finest performance to be in King's Row although most people remember him better for Bedtime for Bonzo or Death Valley Days. Despite this, King's Row did get Academy attention, and is considered a classic.
• Ishiro Honda considers his finest film to be Matango, a film virtually unknown to all but Toho sci-fi fans. Instead, his most well-known and best-remembered work is, of course, Godzilla (1954). Subverted in that those who have actually watched Matango usually consider it among his best works.
• David Lean tends to be known for his small-scale but stylish early films (Great Expectations, Brief Encounter) or his later epics like Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago. His personal favorite was the comparatively obscure Summertime (1955), starring Katharine Hepburn and filmed in Venice.
• Bring up Jack Nicholson at a party these days and you'll most likely be hit with a reference to The Shining or perhaps his turn as The Joker in Batman (1989), rather than any one of his twelve Oscar-nominated roles, the sole exception perhaps A Few Good Men, and even that's because of his "you can't handle the truth!" outburst. He holds the record for most Academy-Award-nominated performances by a male actor, but how many "Jack Nicholson fans" even know what you're talking about when you say Five Easy Pieces, The Last Detail, Reds, Terms of Endearment or Prizzi's Honor?
  • One could argue that his first Oscar-winning role in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is well-remembered, and it is, but mostly by film buffs and psychology majors. The film is mostly remembered for Louise Fletcher's Nurse Ratched (used to make comparisons with any real-life uncaring medical professional) or is used to compare to real-life mental institutions.
  • Nicholson's own favorite of all the films he made is Michelangelo Antonioni's The Passenger (1975). He loved that movie so much he bought the negative, provided commentary for it on DVD, and later provided the director with a Lifetime Achievement Award. He calls it, "the adventure of my lifetime".
• In 1977, 20th Century Fox released two films that summer: One was The Other Side of Midnight, which was expected to be a huge hit thanks to being the adaptation of a bestselling book. The other film? Some weird space-opera from that guy who did American Graffiti and starring a bunch of nobodies and old out-of-work actors. The connection between the two was that if a movie theatre wanted a print of the former, they had to show the latter as well. The result? Star Wars became the highest-grossing movie ever for several years and became one of the most iconic moments of pop-culture ever made, while The Other Side Of Midnight was poorly-received and quickly forgotten.
• A lifelong fan of the novel, Richard Stanley's dream project was to make the most faithful adaption of The Island of Doctor Moreau ever put on screen. Once his script was greenlit, Stanley, who had made his mark on low-budget indie films, was quickly overwhelmed working on a Hollywood-scale project, and by trying to direct the increasingly difficult Val Kilmer. Stanley was fired from the production before Marlon Brando had even arrived on set, and the replacement director, John Frankenheimer, didn't fare much better. Stanley was so burned by the experience he didn't make another (short) film until 2011.
• While most viewers would argue that Quentin Tarantino's best work is Pulp Fiction, and everyone will agree it is his signature film, there's a pretty big hint in Inglourious Basterds that he considers that to be his magnum opus. Specifically, the film ends with a character (who was originally going to be played by Tarantino) looking directly at the camera and saying "I think this might be my masterpiece." That being said, there are some people who agree with Tarantino, and even those who put Pulp Fiction in first will often cite Basterds as the runner-up.
• In interviews with Deadline and Empire◊, Ridley Scott speaks highly of his much-derided Cormac McCarthy-penned thriller The Counselor, saying that it was "One of the best things I've done and it got fucking murdered".
• While it's hard to call anything made by Herschell "the Godfather of Gore" Gordon Lewis an opus, he considers A Taste of Blood to be his best film, though ironically it's usually seen as one of his worst. Blood Feast is his most well-known, and Two Thousand Maniacs! and The Wizard of Gore are generally seen as his best.
• The Italian film Youth, which is set in a Swiss pension, has 2 in-universe examples.
  • One is with a side character which is a retired actor. He had a few big and dramatic roles throughout his lifetime, but he is only well-known for his role in a few robot movies. He was surprised to hear of a girl that she knows him from his favorite acting role.
    • The very same actor also thinks that Simple Songs is this for the main character (a composer), but it turns out that the main character thinks rather highly of it as he has written the music because it allows his wife to sing something.
  • The other of the 2 main characters (a film director) thought of a certain actress that he found on the streets that he trained to become one of the truly greatest actresses of the world as his biggest achievement. By the end of the film, it is revealed that the actress barely cared about her life with him, saying that she found her own hard work on the streets to learn how to act well prior to joining him more admirable than the pure carelessness that the film director had for her during the time when she was an actor under his thumb. She even said that she had no interest to participate in one of his final films and that she already had a role in a US telenovela that she would prefer to do.
• Most Jackie Chan enthusiasts tend to agree that Drunken Master II is his best film, or at least the one with the best fight scenes, and it's likely his most widely-seen Hong Kong film in the west. However, Chan feels that the comparatively obscure Police Story is his best.
• Crimson Peak was divisively received, and failed to make back its budget. Despite fans proclaiming it to not be up to the director's standards, Guillermo del Toro still regards it as one of his three best films.
• Deborah Kerr was a highly decorated actress in Hollywood in the 1950s, with six Oscar nominations to her name. The films she is most remembered for today are The King and I, From Here to Eternity and An Affair to Remember. But the film she considered to be her best performance? The 1960 British ghost story The Innocents, which, while a Cult Classic these days, was soundly ignored at the time by every major awards organization going. Of the films that did earn her Oscar nominations, she says that it's The Sundowners that she should have won for.
• Michelle Pfeiffer experienced this when Matthew Vaughn cast her in Stardust. He told the actress what his favorite film of hers was - and it was Grease 2. Her reaction was a Flat "What" (as the movie is a major Old Shame for her).
• Errol Flynn was best known for starring in Swashbucklers, yet his personal favorite film of his own was the boxing picture Gentleman Jim.
• John Ford's most famous films in his lifetime were The Quiet Man, How Green Was My Valley, The Grapes of Wrath, The Informer, Stagecoach. Critics would cite Young Mr. Lincoln. Later generations of film-makers and audiences cited The Searchers and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. What were Ford's favorites?
  • Wagon Master which he described as "the purest, simplest Western I ever made." A rare title that Lindsay Anderson called "the first avant-garde Western" citing its unconventional use of music, gorgeous composition and minimalist storyline and its plot of multiple characters with no real central figure.
  • The Sun Shines Bright which despite its Executive Meddling, he felt was a film he achieved what he wanted to. Another obscure title.
  • Even more extreme is The Fugitive, his 1947 adaptation of Graham Greene's novel The Power and the Glory. Ford once called it the most perfect movie he'd ever made. Critics (and Graham Greene himself) hated it, and still do.
• Christopher Lee was best known for playing Dracula, but he felt that the best Hammer Horror he made was The Devil Rides Out, and his favorite role was Lord Summersisle in The Wicker Man (1973).
• While she was working simultaneously on the screenplays for both films, Sofia Coppola felt that Lost in Translation would be just a little-seen arthouse film, and Marie Antoinette (2006) would be the Magnum Opus that she'd be remembered for. Instead, what happened was essentially the opposite — Lost in Translation was a smash hit that got Coppola an Academy Award for Best Screenplay, while Marie Antoinette proved a critical and commercial bomb — and the resulting Artist Disillusionment that Coppola felt was enough for her to swear off making films for mainstream audiences, focusing mostly on indie productions and reportedly only agreeing to make the Netflix special A Very Murray Christmas as a personal favor to Bill Murray.
  • However in recent years Marie Antoinette is getting reevaluated as a feminist studyof a reviled (female) historical figure which many believe was why it was critically hated in the first place.
• In her later years, Ingrid Bergman admitted to being somewhat rankled that Casablanca ("an assembly-line wartime propaganda picture") came to eclipse her more "important" and artistic films with Hitchcock and Rossellini, and her collaboration with Ingmar Bergman, among others; in her own words, all people ever wanted to talk about was "that one with Bogart".
• Die Hard: While Bruce Willis believes the first film is the best one, he's said that among the sequels, Live Free or Die Hard was the best one. Many fans, however, tend to think Die Hard with a Vengeance was the best, in large part because it's the only one directed by the original Die Hard director, John McTiernan.
• Shinya Tsukamoto regards his second film, Hiruko the Goblin (an Affectionate Parody of American horror movies, including The Thing (1982), The Evil Dead (1981), even Ghostbusters (1984) and Gremlins) to be more representative of his film making style than Tetsuo: The Iron Man. The latter is a Cult Classic, the former wasn't released to the states until 2002, and was left out of a Blu-ray retrospective of the director's films.
• Brooke Shields is known primarily as an actress, but her acting career is pretty undistinguished. She must be considered and better remembered as a fashion model.
  • Pretty Baby is the movie where Brooke Shields got her first starring role, and the only one she enjoyed during filming, but is not considered among Louis Malle’s best works. Malle never considered in his lifetime Pretty Baby his finest film; it was just a filler film between Black Moon and Atlantic City, and, as a result, was left out of a Blu-ray retrospective of the director's filmography.
    • And Pretty Baby, the movie that Paramount hoped to be the studio's potential blockbuster for 1978, was soon dwarfed at the box office by an adaptation of a successful stage musical the studio had little hope. The result: Grease was the year's highest-grossing movie and a pop-culture event, while Pretty Baby was poorly received and quickly forgotten (probably for the best, as it attracted the interest of certain people due to 14-year-old Brooke Shields portraying a prostitute).
• Max Landis wrote Bright intending it to be his A New Hope - but after the film received copious rewrites by director David Ayer, Landis liked a tweet calling it "an embarrassing disaster." Most people now know him for co-writing Chronicle with Josh Trank (and being John Landis' son).
• Patty Jenkins enjoyed working on Wonder Woman 1984 more than she did on the first, having criticized some things from the latter in the lead-up to the release of the sequel, like Diana using a sword or the studio-enforced third act, and she defends it to this day. WW84 is how she prefers the superheroine to be, but most critics and audiences prefer the first film.
  • The very mixed reception to Wonder Woman 1984 hasn't stopped Warner Bros. from submitting the movie to every Academy Award category, something they've never done with any film in the DC Extended Universe (they did with Joker, which had more obvious Oscar Bait features).
• When Steve Martin met Olivia Hussey, he gushed that she had starred in his favorite movie growing up. She thought he was talking about Romeo and Juliet (1968). Nope - Black Christmas (1974).
• Ishir⁠ō Honda, best known for directing Godzilla (1954) and kickstarting the entire kaiju genre, considered All Monsters Attack to be one of his favourite films to have directed, likely due to its grounded tone, which relegates fantasy kaiju elements to Dream Sequences, and a familiar domestic Japanese setting with more realistic issues, rather than another sci-fi giant monster flick, which he was frustrated he was pigeonholed into later in his career. Among Godzilla fans, it's widely considered one of the worst, if not the absolute worst film in the entire franchise for its annoying child protagonists, shoddy production value, and overuse of Stock Footage.
• Roland Emmerich is best known for keeping the Disaster Movie alive. Yet his favorite movie of his own is Anonymous, a historical drama questioning whether Shakespeare wrote his own plays.
• The Dirty Dozen: Despite being one of his biggest hits, star Lee Marvin reportedly wasn't happy with the final product, which he described as a "dumb moneymaker" that didn't properly capture how this situation would have really played out in the actual war - and he would know, being a World War II veteran himself. Marvin even went as far as to compare this film, unfavorably, to his later WWII epic The Big Red One which he said was a much more accurate depiction of WWII.
• Akira Kurosawa considered Ran to be his greatest work. While it is considered one of Kurosawa's "Big Four", and very few people consider it to be bad, movie buffs will generally hold Rashomon in higher regard, and the general public think higher of either The Seven Samurai or Yojimbo.
• Daniel Craig is far happier playing Benoit Blanc than he ever was as James Bond.
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III is almost universally disliked and considered worse than the second movie. However, both the co-creators of the franchise, Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird on separate occasions have said that they believe that the second movie is worse than the third one.
  • Peter Laird, in his blog, when asked to rank the TMNT movies (that had come out at that point), ranked the third movie above the second one. In a later blog, where he posted about his initial plans for the second movie, he said, answering one of the fans, that he thinks the second one was far more ridiculous compared to the third one.
  • Kevin Eastman, in 2014, said the following:
    "What we tried to do with the third movie was to make it as good of a story as we could. We went through a painstaking level of do's and don'ts, what they could and couldn't do. We wanted something that would be good for all ages again. I call movie one the best, movie two the worst, and movie three halfway in between."
• John Belushi co-wrote a screenplay called Noble Rot which he hoped to star in and which would be his breakout into a more literate and sophisticated form of comedy role. Being a Genre Throwback to Screwball Comedy, studios were lukewarm, wanting Belushi to stick to the Fat Slob characters he was known for. His depression over the lack of interest for Noble Rot is speculated to be a contributing factor to the coke-heroine binge that cost him his life.
• The Hindenburg (1975): In his autobiography, Robert Clary speaks particularly fondly of his performance as Spah, which he thought might win him a Best Supporting Actor Award. The film flopped, and while it has been Vindicated by History, his TV performances are still far better known and regarded than his (admittedly show-stealing) turn as Spah.

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