It’s time for another Rotten Tomatoes Showdown!
This time, as part of our RT25 anniversary celebration, we’ve rounded up 64 noteworthy directors who made their feature debuts in the last 25 years — yes, that includes folks like Christopher Nolan and Greta Gerwig, whose latest films are currently tearing up the box office and might be the best one-two theatrical punch we’ve gotten in decades.
Of course, we could have easily gone one round further and included up to 128 directors, because a quarter century is a long time, and we’ve just been flooded with fantastic new talent since 1998. But we don’t want this to drag on forever, so we did have to make some difficult decisions. To qualify, a director had to have made their feature-length debut sometime in 1998 or later, and they had to have directed at least three films. This unfortunately meant that some big names like Edgar Wright (his first film was 1995’s A Fistful of Fingers), M. Night Shyamalan (his first was 1992’s Praying with Anger), and animation wizard Satoshi Kon (Perfect Blue debuted in 1997) didn’t make the cut. And with only 64 slots, there’s a good chance we weren’t able to include all of your darlings, but we tried to pull from a wide variety of directors across the spectrum.
Having said that, we hopefully have enough of your favorite maestros listed here to make the competition fun, so let’s get started! Round 1 will stay open for voting until Monday, August 7 at 10pm PT, and Round 2 will go live the next day. Make sure to cast your votes to advance the directors you love, and of course, feel free to beat us up in the comments for the ones we left out! (Seriously, this was a difficult list to narrow down.)
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