Shyamalan Was Called 'the Next Spielberg.' Then, a Fall

By the time M. Night Shyamalan was in his early 30s, he had a huge hit to his name thanks to 1999's The Sixth Sense, his psychological thriller starring Bruce Willis and Haley Joel Osment, and two follow-ups—2000's Unbreakable and 2002's Signs—that seemed to cement his status as a top-tier filmmaker known for twist endings. Writing for the Atlantic, film critic David Sims notes that Shyamalan earned two Oscar nominations for The Sixth Sense, and that Newsweek even dubbed him "the next Spielberg." Then came The Village in 2004, with high expectations for the young director, but the movie fell flat—Roger Ebert called it "witless"—and Shyamalan, then 34, suddenly saw his career enter "a period of steep decline, one from which it wasn't clear he would recover," Sims writes. "In a remarkably short span, a wunderkind had become a punch line," he adds.

The profile details Shyamalan's youth, when his love of movies was first spurred by seeing Star Wars at the age of 7—a love that likely kept him going even as he followed up The Village with another bust, 2006's Lady in the Water. Shyamalan struggled to find his footing over the next few years, until the low-budget The Visit in 2015, which raked in nearly $100 million around the globe. Today, he continues to focus on films that are "self-consciously over-the-top, even campy," with "an explosive finale," albeit now in "shoestring mode"—both in terms of cost to make, and via "a new economy in his storytelling." His newest movie, Trap, starring Josh Hartnett, is now in theaters, with a simple yet alluring concept, per Shyamalan: "What if The Silence of the Lambs happened at a Taylor Swift concert?" Read the profile here. (More M. Night Shyamalan stories.)