It’s hard to pinpoint what, exactly, went wrong for Waititi. A controversial Oscar player will always be met with blowback, so it’s no surprise that some critics and audiences were angered by Jojo Rabbit‘s success. Further, Thor: Love and Thunder hit just as superhero fatigue set in, as audiences have grown tired of even a more unconventional entry in the genre. Finally, Waititi himself became something of a celebrity, perhaps overestimating the public’s interest in him as a figure. For many, rumors about his love life and lackluster performances (see: the noxious riffing he does as a cool boss in the Ryan Reynolds comedy Free Guy) made Waititi an irritant, despite the success of the TV series What We Do in the Shadows and Our Flag Means Death.
In short, Waititi became too big, too hyped, and too separated from what he does best. The exact same thing happened to Shyamalan, who went from small, somewhat sappy genre pictures with a nasty edge, to bloated, high-concept messes like The Last Airbender (2010) and After Earth (2013).
By the time What We Do in the Shadows hit theaters, M. Night Shyamalan was a byword among movie fans, an utter joke. Yet, he’s managed to recover, to the point that all of his movies do fairly well, and fans are waiting with excitement for his next picture, Remain, a collaboration with romance author Nicholas Sparks, of all people.
How did things turn around for Shyamalan? It wasn’t lashing out at critics, even though he did do some of that. In his most self-indulgent film, Lady in the Water (2006), in which he cast himself as the world’s most important storyteller, Shymalan also cast Bob Balaban as a bitter, snotty critic, one who gets justly mauled by the movie’s monster.
Rather, it was by going small again. To hear him tell it, he had to learn to be scared again. Starting with the nasty little found-footage movie The Visit (2015), Shyamalan has mortgaged his house to fund his movies, betting entirely on himself instead of a studio. But for us viewers, Shymalan has simply gone back to doing what he does best. There’s no more talk of him being Spielberg, no more sticking his name on too many undeveloped projects. He makes small-scale horror movies that are kind of sweet, kind of nasty, and totally idiosyncratic.
Not everyone can accept the open-hearted absurdity of Old (2021) or the utter disregard of realism in Trap (2024). But there are enough people on Shyamalan’s wavelength for those movies to keep making money, almost completely redeeming the reputation he seemed to have lost.
