You’ve got to hand it to M. Night Shyamalan for reinventing himself and managing to salvage his career just as it was beginning to look as though he’d been written off for good, with the writer and director now in the process of consistently churning out mid budget genre films that can always be relied on to turn a tidy profit at the box office.
That certainly wasn’t the case a decade ago, when a string of critical and commercial disasters had effectively ruined his reputation and almost killed his mainstream career. Avatar: The Last Airbender and After Earth are unquestionably a pair of the worst blockbusters ever made, but it was Lady in the Water that signaled the beginning of Shyamalan’s rapid downturn.
After four smash hits in a row with The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, Signs, and The Village, the modern-day fantasy fable became the first one of his features to score a unanimous drubbing from reviewers and audiences alike, while it also ended up as his first high-profile flop after barely recouping its $70 million budget from theaters.
The preposterous plot basically saw Shyamalan insert himself into the story as the anointed savior of the world as an erstwhile prophet destined to make the planet a better place, which is about as self-indulgent as it gets. That being said, what continues to irk people to this day – at least judging by a recent Reddit thread – is that Lady in the Water was marketed as having hints of the horror and thriller genres, which it most definitely does not.
Misleading marketing is a common practice in Hollywood, but certain TV spots and promos for Lady in the Water were borderline false advertising, which didn’t do its reputation any favors when it wasn’t even particularly engaging to begin with.
