Every Michael Douglas Movie Ranked From Worst To Best

Michael Douglas is nothing less than a Hollywood legend. The son of famed actor Kirk Douglas began his own acting career in the late 1960s, taking on a television role in "CBS Playhouse" and a lead role in the feature film "Hail, Hero!" 

There is seemingly nothing that Douglas can't accomplish as an actor. He's played romantic leads, action heroes, presidents, burnouts, fathers, and sons. Whether he's in an Oscar-caliber drama or helping Marvel build a mega-franchise in "Ant-Man," Douglas brings his best to every role.

That's not to say that every movie is Douglas' best. Anyone with more than 50 years of acting experience is sure to have worked on some less-than-wonderful films at times, but even in Douglas' worst movies, he stands out as an actor with surprising talent and charm. Douglas' work has earned him many awards, including a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Film Institute, an honor that was also once given to Douglas' father (via THR). No matter what genre of film piques your interest, Douglas has a role worth watching. From his worst to his best, here are all of Michael Douglas' movies.

Michael Douglas made his feature film debut in the 1969 black-and-white drama "Hail, Hero!" and the movie left a lot to be desired. David Manber adapted the screenplay from a John Weston novel, and David Miller directed the film. Douglas stars in the lead role as Carl Dixon, a man with hippie sensibilities who's trying to make sense of the chaos caused by the Vietnam war. Carl decides to enlist in the Army to try and spread a message of love to all the troops.

Douglas scored a Golden Globe nomination for Most Promising Newcomer, but the film itself was lambasted by critics at the time. Writing for The New York Times, one reviewer stated that Douglas' performance was "not especially memorable," but that without it, "'Hail, Hero!' would not even be tolerable." Those are harsh words, but then again, there aren't many actors who knock it out of the park with their very first role.

Michael Douglas has worked with director Rob Reiner on two occasions. Their first collaboration is one of Douglas' best films of all time, so it'll come a little later in the list. The two reunited for the 2014 film "And So It Goes," which is another rom-com that fails to hit its mark. Douglas plays widower Oren Little, who focuses his attention on his realty business and has little patience for friends, family, and children. Oren's neighbor Leah (Diane Keaton) is a widow with no children looking for an outlet for her creative energies. The two of them are brought together when it falls on Oren to care for his 10-year-old granddaughter.

"And So It Goes" is as overly sentimental as it sounds, but it never quite manages to hit a note of sincerity. Rotten Tomatoes called the film an "unintentional tragedy," and critics gave it an 18% rating. Despite the poor reviews, the film wasn't a total flop. It managed to earn $25 million at the box office.

Long before they were known for helming some of the greatest Marvel movies to date, the Russo brothers directed a financially successful but critically maligned comedy called "You, Me and Dupree." The film stars Matt Dillon and Kate Hudson as a newlywed couple Carl and Molly Peterson, whose lives are disrupted when their friend Dupree (Owen Wilson) needs to live with them. Michael Douglas plays the father of Hudson's character and acts as a pseudo-antagonist for the film while Carl struggles to earn his approval.

The film more than doubled its budget at the box office, but it didn't fare nearly as well with critics. The Rotten Tomatoes critics consensus calls the film a "generic entry" and says it "wears out its welcome." Audiences over on IMDb didn't appreciate the film either, giving it a 5.6 rating overall. Luckily for the Russos, "You, Me and Dupree" was just part of the early days of two very successful directorial careers.

This 2001 film was based on the Andrew Klavan novel "Don't Say a Word." The screenplay was adapted by Anthony Peckham and Patrick Smith Kelly, and Gary Fleder directed the film. Michael Douglas stars as psychologist Nathan Conrad, whose daughter is kidnapped by jewel thief Patrick Koster (Sean Bean). Patrick promises to return Nathan's daughter if he can get an institutionalized mental patient to reveal the location of a gem worth millions of dollars.

At best, "Don't Say a Word" could be called moderately successful. It earned double its budget during its theatrical run, and IMDb users give it a somewhat favorable 6.3 rating. Overall, the film is well directed and features some strong performances, but, as Rotten Tomatoes notes, none of its best elements overpower its plot, which manages to walk a thin line between being utterly ridiculous and entirely too predictable.

Released in 1979, "The In-Laws" is a beloved action-comedy. Unfortunately for Michael Douglas, he starred in 2003's remake of the film, which ended up being a total flop. Andrew Fleming directed the remake, which followed roughly the same plot as the original while changing details like locations and character names. Douglas plays Steve Tobias, an undercover CIA agent whose son is marrying the daughter of podiatrist Jerry Peyser. Jerry discovers Steve's identity, and to protect his cover, Steve pulls Jerry into an overseas CIA mission.

The remake tried and failed to take advantage of the original film's cult status. Off of a reported budget of $40 million, "The In-Laws" earned less than $27 million at the box office (via Bomb Report). Critics and audiences alike were unimpressed, but not outright disappointed, with the film. Rotten Tomatoes gives it a 33% rating and says it's "bigger and slicker than the original, but not necessarily better."

What could go wrong when mixing neo-noir vibes with a comedy script? A lot, it turns out. "One Night at McCool's" failed to impress overall. The film barely broke $13 million during its box office run, despite having an $18 million budget (via Box Office Mojo). It performed slightly better critically than financially, though its underwhelming attempts at comedy and its casting of Liv Tyler were both cited as detrimental to the film overall.

The film has a somewhat repetitive structure. Each of the three leads, played by Matt Dillon, Paul Reiser, and John Goodman, tells their version of events. The overlapping element in all their stories is the con woman Jewel (Tyler). Michael Douglas is Mr. Burmeister, who gets paid $10,000 to kill Jewel. There's enough here for an entertaining 90 minutes, but with a 33% Tomatometer rating and an audience score that's only slightly higher, "One Night at McCool's" won't go down as a misunderstood cult classic.

Michael Douglas' second feature film was quite a bit better than his debut, but that doesn't mean it was an Oscar-worthy outing. Directed by and written by Stephen and Elinor Karpf, "Adam at Six A.M." tells the story of college professor Adam Gaines spending a summer in Missouri after attending a relative's funeral. While living a rural lifestyle and getting work building power lines, Adam falls in love and begins to reevaluate his life and career.

The 1970 film was Scheerer's feature-length directorial debut. He only went on to direct one more feature, though he worked most of his life as a prolific television director. "Adam at Six A.M." isn't a celebrated film, but audiences give it middling reviews. It's a charming look at Douglas developing his skills early in his career. 

If you've ever wondered whether or not Michael Douglas has the singing voice of an angel, you might have already discovered that 1985's movie musical "A Chorus Line" can't answer that. The film stars Douglas as Zach, a theater director casting dancers for a new show, but the people auditioning for him are the only ones who sing. The story examines the gritty life of professional theater actors and unearths the relationship between Zach and unemployable actress Cassie (Alyson Reed).

"A Chorus Line" is based on a stage production of the same name. The stage show has had some real success over the years, but its translation to the big screen didn't work out so well. Despite the best efforts of the cast and director David Attenborough, "A Chorus Line" bombed at the box office and failed to really impress critics.

Sports movies come in all varieties, but there might be a reason that there aren't scores of films about Olympic running. 1979's "Running," written and directed by Steven Hilliard Stern, is exactly that. Michael Douglas stars as Michael Andropolis, who's training to be a marathon runner in the 1976 Summer Olympics. Michael's wife Janet (Susan Anspach) is in the process of leaving him, and Michael needs to find a way to pull his marriage and his athletic career together.

The problems with "Running" have nothing to do with the film's performers. A contemporary reviewer for The New York Times praised Douglas' "power and intensity" but bemoaned the fact that the movie gives him "little to do ... except run and occasionally look winded." At that point in time, Douglas' career was starting to heat up, but the best was yet to come.

Susan Isaacs released her novel "Shining Through" in 1988. Four years later, its film adaptation, written and directed by David Seltzer, made its way to the big screen. The story is a World War II spy drama with a thread of romance woven throughout. Linda Voss (Melanie Griffith) works alongside Ed Leland (Michael Douglas) at the Office of Strategic Services in the build-up to the war. As the two of them fall in love, war erupts, and Linda volunteers to go undercover in Nazi Germany.

Opinions on "Shining Through" are thoroughly mixed. Rotten Tomatoes reveals that audiences enjoyed the film significantly more than critics, and reviews on IMDb are split right down the middle as well. Fans of war movies and star-crossed love stories will likely feel perfectly at home here, but everyone else can probably give this movie a pass. 

This erotic thriller takes place in the high-tech world of CD-ROM production. While this 1994 film might be a bit outdated for modern audiences in more ways than one, "Disclosure" was a major box office success when it was first released. The film made over $200 million from a budget of just $50 million (via Box Office Mojo). Critics and audiences weren't terribly impressed by the film, which suffers from the same hard-to-believe plot that plagues the Michael Crichton novel the film is based on.

Tom Sanders (Michael Douglas) works in CD-ROM production and expects to be promoted when his boss retires. Instead, the job is given to his boss' daughter, played by Demi Moore. To make Tom's situation even worse, his new boss soon frames him for sexual harassment and threatens to destroy his life and career. As a peak back into the wilds of '90s culture, "Disclosure" is still worth a watch, but it should probably be left wherever CD-ROMs live now.

When people walked out of theaters after watching "Wall Street" in 1987, few were probably wondering when the film would get a sequel. Over 20 years later, although "Wall Street" was definitely remembered fondly, many were shocked to see 20th Century Fox giving a sequel a go with "Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps." The studio got Oliver Stone to direct, had Michael Douglas return as Gordon Gekko, and paired him with young star Shia LaBeouf for another exploration of high-class greed and master manipulation.

There was a possibility that "Money Never Sleeps" could have been the rare sequel that surpassed the original, but sadly, the film fell a little flat and didn't make nearly the impression that it could have. Though it earned mixed reviews at best, the "Wall Street" sequel still featured great performances from its leads and its excellent supporting cast, including Carey Mulligan and Josh Brolin. Douglas even won a Golden Globe nomination for his work in the film.

1992's "Basic Instinct" took the premise of a cable police procedural and turned it into an iconic, if not exactly spectacular, erotic thriller. The film follows detective Nick Curran (Michael Douglas) as he investigates the murder of a rock star. His chief suspect is the rocker's girlfriend Catherine, played by Sharon Stone, who previously published a crime novel that laid out the murder in detail. Catherine and Nick have a hot-blooded affair as the investigation spirals into uncertainty.

To say that "Basic Instinct" stretches believability until it breaks is a fair criticism that also mostly misses the point. Audiences loved the wild ride of the sexy plot, and the film blew up at the box office, earning hundreds of millions of dollars with its relatively small budget (via Box Office Mojo), though critics gave the film uneven reviews. Michael Douglas should be commended for sitting back and letting Stone shine in what Rotten Tomatoes calls a "star-making performance."

This is the debut film from director/screenwriter M. Cahill. He followed up the film more than a decade later when he released his second feature, "Porcupine," in 2021. "The King of California" opened to mostly positive reviews. A reviewer for The New York Times praised Douglas' work in the film, calling it his "strongest screen performance since 'Wonder Boys.'"

Charlie (Douglas) reunites with his 16-year-old daughter Miranda (Evan Rachel Wood) when he's released from a mental institution. Miranda's mother left the family, so Miranda has been supporting herself in Charlie's absence. Miranda hopes that Charlie's release means that he's getting better, but she begins to doubt that when he tells her about a secret stash of Spanish gold hidden under their suburban neighborhood.

Back in 1993, Michael Douglas starred in a cult film that has some striking similarities to Todd Phillips' "Joker." Whether or not you prefer Joel Schumacher's "Falling Down" to the 2019 supervillain film probably has a lot to do with your allegiance to DC comics, but audiences and critics alike praised the film for its "popcorn-friendly take" on a wide array of political and cultural themes (via Rotten Tomatoes). Both films take a look at the consequences of men bottling their pain and anger until they unleash it on the world.

Douglas stars as Bill "D-Fens" Foster, a downtrodden man struggling to come to terms with his lost job and failed marriage. Bill walks across the city of Los Angeles through uniquely intense summer heat, and almost every one of his encounters with other people ends in a violent outburst from Bill. "Falling Down" feels almost just as relevant today as it did in the early '90s. One modern reviewer called it "one of Hollywood's most overt yet morally complex depictions of the modern white-victimization narrative" (via LA Weekly). Schumacher and Douglas crafted a complex character absorbed with so much more than just surface-level rage. 

Oliver Stone directed and co-wrote this 1987 film about the extravagance and greed of Wall Street investors in the Reagan years. "Wall Street" won Michael Douglas an Academy Award for Best Actor. It was his second statuette; "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," which he produced, had previously won Best Picture. "Wall Street" nearly tripled its budget at the box office, and it has a 79% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

Charlie Sheen stars as Bud Fox, a young stockbroker with dreams of making it big on Wall Street. Bud engages in insider trading with his mentor, the obscenely wealthy Gordon Gekko (Douglas). Gordon believes that "greed, for lack of a better word, is good," and Bud falls into that mentality until he begins to see the damage that Gordon's corporate raiding does to others. The film's message still resonates today, and its 126 minutes are unforgettable largely thanks to Douglas' riveting, magnetic performance.

Steven Soderbergh directed this action-packed thriller about clandestine organizations and covert operatives that are constantly at each other's throats. Gina Carano stars as highly trained black-ops agent Mallory Kane. Carano is joined by a number of other big stars, including Ewan McGregor, Michael Fassbender, Antonio Banderas, and Channing Tatum. Douglas plays a CIA agent who gives Mallory Kane and her partner a special mission that goes horribly wrong.

"Haywire" was far from a box office smash, but its earnings exceeded its budget, and critical response to the film was glowing. It has an 80% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, which praises the film's "top-notch cast and outstanding direction." Audiences didn't connect to the film on the same level, leaving it with a 41% audience score and only a 5.8 rating on IMDb. For action aficionados, though, "Haywire" is well worth the time.

Directed by David Fincher, "The Game" had the misfortune of being released right between "Se7en" and "Fight Club." While those other two films got the lion's share of attention, "The Game" is a phenomenal thriller that stands equal to both of them. Michael Douglas stars as Nicholas van Orton, a rich banker whose brother gives him a ticket for a game with Consumer Recreation Services. Nicholas' brother promises that the game will change his life, but when Nicholas gets involved, he realizes he might not survive to see the game's end.

"The Game" is filled with twists and turns that keep viewers on the edge of their seats the entire time. Fincher's masterful style ratchets up the tension with each scene. "The Game" broke the hundred-million-dollar mark at the box office, and critics raved about the film. "The Game" proves that Fincher can do no wrong, especially when he's working with actors, like Douglas, who are at the top of their game.

Here is another Michael Douglas film with a jaw-dropping cast that includes Tobey Maguire, Robert Downey Jr., Alan Tudyk, and Frances McDormand. Curtis Hanson directed "Wonder Boys," and Steve Kloves adapted the screenplay from the successful novel of the same name by acclaimed author Michael Chabon. Douglas stars as a creative writing professor who's struggling to finish his second novel while dealing with complicated relationships with his friends and lover.

"Wonder Boys" was nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Editing at the Academy Awards. The film took home the Oscar for Best Original Song, for "Things Have Changed," written by folk legend Bob Dylan. Rotten Tomatoes gives "Wonder Boys" an 81% approval rating with high praise for Douglas' and Maguire's performances. In spite of the critical success, "Wonder Boys" bombed at the box office, making back just over half of its budget.

"Ant-Man and the Wasp" is one of those rare sequels that outperformed the original film at every level. Peyton Reed returned to the director's chair for the film that also saw the return of Paul Rudd as Scott Lang, Michael Douglas as Hank Pym, and Evangeline Lilly as Hank's daughter, Hope van Dyne. After the events of "Captain America Civil War," Scott is on house arrest and rethinking his relationship to fatherhood and superhero-hood. Hank and Hope, now acting as the Wasp, pull Scott back into the fold for another mission that unearths their past.

"Ant-Man and the Wasp" was another major commercial success for Marvel. The film earned over $600 million at the box office, surpassing the original by roughly $100 million. It performed better than the original critically as well, pulling in an 87% approval rating from Rotten Tomatoes. The film worked so well that production on its sequel "Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania" began almost immediately.

Michael Douglas, Kathleen Turner, and Danny DeVito first united their talents in Robert Zemeckis' classic adventure film "Romancing the Stone." The screenplay was written by Diane Thomas and follows romance writer Joan Wilder (Turner) as she's pulled into a novelistic adventure in Colombia. In order to save her sister's life from an evil smuggler (DeVito), she enlists the help of bird smuggler Jack Colton (Douglas).

"Romancing the Stone" is a near-perfect, lighthearted adventure flick. Critics particularly praised the "sparkling chemistry" of the film's cast, which made every moment of the over-the-top action more believable, relatable, and fun. The film was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Editing, but it won two Golden Globes – Best Comedy Motion Picture and Best Performance by an Actress for Turner (via IMDb).

With a script from Aaron Sorkin and direction from Rob Reiner, 1995's "The American President" had plenty going for it even before actors like Michael Douglas, Annette Bening, Martin Sheen, and Michael J. Fox joined the cast. "The American President" is a romantic comedy about widowed President Andrew Shepard (Douglas) falling in love with environmental lobbyist Sydney Ellen Wade (Bening). President Shepard is seeking reelection, and his new relationship threatens his ability to win.

"The American President" earned itself a slew of award nominations including Best Original Score at the Academy Awards in addition to Best Motion Picture, Best Director, Best Actress, Best Actor, and Best Screenplay at the Golden Globes. The screenplay worked so well that Sorkin would later return to White House-centered drama as the writer of "The West Wing," which also starred Sheen. Rotten Tomatoes gives the film a 91% approval rating and calls it "a charming romantic comedy with political bite." It's Michael Douglas' best rom-com by far, but "The American President" has more meat on its bones than simply jokes and sentimentality.

Michael Douglas' best movie also came from working with Stephen Soderbergh. In 2013, HBO released "Behind the Candelabra," a biopic following the last 10 years of Liberace's life. Richard LaGravenese wrote the screenplay based on a biography from authors Scott Thorson and Alex Thorleifson. Michael Douglas headlines as Liberace. Matt Damon plays Scott Thorson, who meets and falls in love with the famed pianist when he's 18 years old. The two are together from 1977 to 1982 and reunite five years later, shortly before Liberace's death.

"Behind the Candelabra" blew up at the 2014 Primetime Emmy Awards. The film took home 11 awards in total, including Outstanding Cast, Outstanding Lead Actor, and Outstanding Director (via IMDb). It was nominated for an additional four Emmy awards, including nods for the cinematography, screenplay, Damon's performance, and the supporting performance from Scott Bakula. With a 7.0 rating on IMDb and a stunning 94% approval on Rotten Tomatoes, "Behind the Candelabra" is Douglas' best movie role to date, though who knows what the 77-year-old actor still has in store for the world.