Filmmakers and studio executives, be warned: a long-suspected Oscars curse may in fact be real.

Over the past 13 years, the vast majority of best director winners have followed up their wins with disastrous films that tanked at the box office or alienated viewers. These films ultimately brought the highs of a career-defining moment crashing down to the reality of the fickle and unpredictable tastes of modern audiences.

Take a look and a pattern becomes clear: Ang Lees Life of Pi (2012) follow-up Billy Lynns Long Halftime Walk (2016) was a box office disaster. Damien Chazelles La La Land (2016) follow-up First Man (2018) failed to connect. Guillermo del Toros Nightmare Alley (2021) didnt come close to making back its budget after The Shape of Water (2018) dazzled the Academy. Chlo Zhao followed up the gorgeousNomadland (2020) with the would-be superhero franchise starter, Eternals (2021). That one landed with a thud. The heretofore suspected best director curse seen as early as 1980 with the epic Western and studio bankrupting Heavens Gate, Michael Ciminos post-The Deer Hunter dud lurched into full view in recent weeks with Mickey 17, Bong Joon Hos big-budget, big-swing sci-fi bomb.

The Robert Pattinson-led sci-fi dark comedy is all but certain to lose tens of millions in its theatrical run, despite being well reviewed and also earning strong audience scores on Rotten Tomatoes. The Warner Bros. film was budgeted at $118 million (before a pricey marketing campaign), and has grossed just $40.8 million domestically and $110.7 million globally to date.

Pity Bong, the South Korean master filmmaker whose precision-controlled and cleverly plotted anti-capitalism suspense thriller, Parasite, made him the toast of Cannes in 2018 and then at the Academy Awards the following year; his career-best film took the Palme dOr and then steadily marched toward a surprising four Oscars. It was a happy night for Bong, and for foreign-language cinema, as he held his little gold men, charming onlookers as he made them kiss one another from the press stage. In that moment, he had no idea that the curse had already gripped him.

Arturo Holmes/ABC This [award] is the supreme validation youre getting from Hollywood. So you know: Youre really good, Thomas Doherty, a film professor at Brandeis University, tells The Hollywood Reporter. And unless you get your head screwed on right, that can be a real problem. I think very few artists, or very few people in general, kind of have that ability to sort of step back from their art.

Any filmmaker who takes home the directing Oscar has plenty of leverage when choosing their next project. Bong, for instance, noted he had final cut approval on Mickey 17. Perhaps some of these directors take the money offered amid the afterglow of Oscar night, then fly too close to the sun and crash and burn.

Back in 2016, Lees major career misfire, Billy Lynns Long Halftime Walk, followed his directing Oscar win for Life of Pi. The Iraq War film was both critically maligned and a commercial bomb that can only be attributed to hubris,vis--vis the allure of new filmmaking technology. Lee, one of the most talented living filmmakers whod already won a directing Oscar for Brokeback Mountain, doubled down on the technical mastery that won him the gold for Life of Pi by shooting the drama as the first-ever film using an extra-high frame rate of 120 frames per second. He then added the complexities of 3D format at 4K UHD resolution.

The disastrous $2 million total domestic haul for Lees film can partially be blamed on his bold frame rate decision. The correct projectors and screens were difficult to place in theaters, even at its New York Film Festival debut; this led to just five theaters globally screening the film as Lee intended it to be seen. And it still didnt impress critics. Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian wrote that the movies frame rate looks extra-fake and is quite distracting in a story that leads nowhere interesting at all.

Lees $40 million budget for Billy Lynn about equaled the domestic take for Nightmare Alley, Guillermo del Toros 1940s-set neo-noir psychological thriller that followed his Oscar-winning woman-meets-fish-man romance, The Shape of Water, for which he took home Oscars for best picture and best director. Nightmare Alleys big-name director and A-list talent (Bradley Cooper, Cate Blanchett, Rooney Mara and several more) and a December release seemed to portend a hit for the master of gothic and horror. Critics were impressed, but it brought in just a $40 million domestic haul was against a $60 million budget.

What happened with Nightmare Alley is close to what befell La La Land director Damien Chazelles quick-turn follow-up, the Ryan Gosling-led Neil Armstrong biopic, First Man. Like del Toro, Chazelle, the youngest directing winner in Oscars history, was critiqued for the films runtime (150 and 140 minutes, respectively). There was also his curt response to a strange controversy over his decision not to include an image of Armstrong planting the American flag on the moon. (To address the question of whether this was a political statement, the answer is no, Chazelle said at the time. I wanted the primary focus in that scene to be on Neils solitary moments on the moon.)

That all may have impacted its performance, but the fact is that both directors produced films that seem great on paper, had the right cast and won over critics. Well, mostly. In his Vanity Fair review, Richard Lawson described what quite possibly turned off audiences, leading First Man to debut in third place its opening weekend: a lot of the movie has a curious drag, scenes repeating and repeating in slightly tweaked shapes until you just want to yell at the screen.

Don Lee, Richard Madden and director Chlo Zhao Courtesy of Sophie Mutevelian/Marvel Studios Then there was Eternals, Zhaos follow-up to Nomadland. Eternals was already in postproduction on the evening she stepped on the Dolby Theatres stage to accept her award. Perhaps the curse came for her a bit early. Or maybe this is the Peter Principle at play, and some skills, of which Zhou has multitudes, arent always portable.

Oddly or perhaps, tellingly there are two directors who remain exceptions to this creeping curse: Mexican cinema titans Alejandro G. Irritu and Alfonso Cuarn, who both have won the directing Oscar twice over the past dozen years. Yet they didnt fall into the curse with their follow-ups.

Both of these strong filmmakers took home their first Oscasr for their most expansive projects yet Irritu for the star-studded comedy-drama Birdman and Cuarn for the nerve-wracking space two-hander Gravity. Irritu kept the momentum pushing forward with The Revenant and managed the unheard-of feat of winning back-to-back directing Oscars.

Yet sooner or later, both of these men scaled down and explored their own personal history to follow-up their moments of career glory. Irritu turned out 2022s divisive but inarguably unique Bardo; and then theres Roma, Cuarns auditing of his childhood by focusing on his unsung nanny and housekeeper. It won him his second directing Oscar, and it was widely considered to be an instant cinema classic.

One important lesson from the movies is that curses are made tobe broken. Mickey 17 certainly wont be Bongs last film, despite the unfortunate fate it shares with its hero, who dies again and again. And there are several recent best director winners whose follow-ups we have yet to see. Jane Campion (The Power of the Dog), the Daniels (Everything Everywhere All at Once), Christopher Nolan (Oppenheimer) and Sean Barker (Anora) all have a shot at breaking it.

And hey, maybe the curse isnt real and something else is happening here. Doherty suggests to THR that the best director Oscar creates a halo effect around the filmmaker, which can play a part in dooming his follow-up project.

I wonder if the people working with the director producers and writers and actors are over-awed and therefore less willing to question his/her judgment because his/her auteurist brilliance has been validated by the industrys highest award, he ponders. Back in the studio days, a mogul could tell the director on the payroll the film was too long and he needed to cut 25 minutes and that was that. Who today would have the stones to say that to Martin Scorsese or Christopher Nolan?