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David Mumpower: What I take from this is that the M. Night Shyamalan brand continues to matter to a larger segment of viewers than almost any other director working today in terms of opening weekend appeal. I have no logical explanation for this and in fact find myself wondering exactly what Shyamalan has to do to alienate consumers. He's making garbage and he's getting richer and richer doing so.

Actually, The Last Airbender has already made more than The Happening did in its entire run.

Kim Hollis: With The Last Airbender having a worse fresh rating at Rotten Tomatoes than The Happening (8% versus 18%), what will happen next with M. Night Shyamalan's career? How can he gain back the trust of audiences?

Josh Spiegel: The first thing that needs to happen is that he needs to get a metaphorical bucket of cold water over his head. There's a fascinating interview at New York Magazine's website this weekend, conducted after the film opened, dealing partly with the horrendous reviews. Shyamalan's basic argument is "I'm an artist", with no apparent self-awareness, or at least acceptance that most people don't like his new movies. He needs to realize that he's not perceived as a great filmmaker anymore, even if he still thinks he is. Also, here's an idea: next time he makes a movie, how about the ads not hammer the idea that he wrote, produced, and directed the movie into audiences' heads? I'm still shocked the ads for Airbender emphasized his involvement, because all I thought was, "Oh, good, the guy who directed The Happening gets behind the camera again", not "Oh, the guy who directed The Sixth Sense!" Finally, the most obvious suggestion: he should not write his next movie. Not even a stage direction.

Daron Aldridge: Is that The Seventh Sense I smell in the works?





Matthew Huntley: I believe Josh hit the nail on the head. M. Night's proclamation that he's an artist and that people "just don't get" what he sets out to do has put an unbelievably large chip on his shoulder. He feels he's absolved of any blame because artists shouldn't be willing to compromise their vision. It's like he doesn't even care about his audience any more, which is where he loses our trust. He seems to be making movies for M. Night Shyamalan and M. Night Shyamalan only. Does he ever hand his scripts off to anyone and ask, "Hey, what do you think of this?" or "Could you give me some feedback?" I doubt it.

I'll go on record by saying that M. Night, despite all of his flaws, is an ambitious filmmaker. I'm hardly ever bored during his movies, even though the last four have been quite awful. But at least they were intriguingly bad (with the exception of The Last Airbender, which is just plain
Kim Hollis: Josh, I would disagree that they need to take his name out of the ads. I think that's a big part of the reason this movie still had a decent box office performance despite the stinky taint it was carrying.

I think, like others have posited, that Shyamalan needs to perhaps direct a film from someone else's screenplay - with absolutely no doctoring at all. No matter what, he has a lot of interesting flourishes and a notable style that is all his own. It's the story and characters where he really seems to struggle, and perhaps if he allowed his ego to film someone else's story, he could learn something and grow as both a director and a writer.

David Mumpower: I believe that the body of the comments here are valid. I had mentioned the other day that I am of the opinion that what Shyamalan needs more than anything is to be attached at the hip to a producer who can tell him "NO!" This is a common problem once people reach the highest echelon of success. They focus on repeating the behavior that allowed them to reach such rarefied levels of accomplishment. The problem is that they naturally grow intransigent, unwilling to adapt to changing circumstances in the marketplace. Shyamalan made a name for himself on projects that were all him. We're saying he should have someone else write his next project, but that's not a behavior he understands. He needs to have people in his ear, people whose opinion he respects, who will tell him when he's in danger of letting his otherworldly ego override common sense. To her credit, Nina Jacobson did that with Shyamalan yet all that was accomplished is that he went to work with someone else.

The other suggestion I would make is that Shyamalan needs to take a page out of Ang Lee's playbook. After Lee absolutely butchered The Hulk, he reinvigorated his career by making the strangest possible choice of features as his next project. As Matthew points out, the one thing we cannot take away from Shyamalan is that he is supremely talented. The way he can redeem himself with movie lovers is to make a movie that is lovable. He hasn't done that in six to eight years, depending on how a person feels about the twist in The Village. What M. Night Shyamalan needs to remind people of his skill is, at least metaphorically, gay cowboys.

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