On 12 Monkeys he faced dismal test screening results which almost sank his sci-fi parable, while quasi-biblical storms and floods literally washed away his dreams of filming The Man Who Killed Don Quixote.
Even so, a UK debut in lowly 19th place, with a dismal £95,000 from 185 screens, still qualifies as disappointing.
Then again, she hasn't been a significant selling point of any film, except maybe MacGruber, which debuted in June 2010 with a dismal £34,000 from 102 screens.
The film, which concerns the trial of a boarding house owner for complicity in the plot to assassinate Abraham Lincoln, opened here with a predictably dismal £39,000 from 103 screens, yielding an average of £381.
"Hotel Artemis" checked in with a dismal $3.1 million on 2,407 screens.
However, few Iraqis have seen it on the big screen because theaters here remain dismal places.
Toby Young at the Telegraph blog site has a screen grab of a truly dismal poster showing a male model dressed up as a very unconvincing soldier, with the catchline:He needs bulletproof vests NOT an alternative voting system.
Unfortunately, the low-budget execution shows on screen, with a dim and dismal look, and the energy is decidedly lethargic.
ON THE SCREEN The Internet can be a dismal place for young job seekers.
After Mudhafer left, the crawler at the bottom of the TV screen gave the last in a dismal progression of scores for the Packers-Jaguars game: a 20-16 Green Bay loss.
Her first-feature, Red Road, which brought her the Prix du Jury at Cannes, was set in a depressed, working-class Glasgow, where its withdrawn heroine scans a bank of CCTV screens bearing images of an unremittingly dismal world.
