M. Night Shyamalan's seventh feature, the 2006 fantasy-thriller, Lady in the Water, seemed almost destined to fail from the very beginning. The filmmaker was coming off a string of enormous global hits in The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, and Signs, yet his most recent film, 2004's The Village, wasn't received nearly as well. One of the more positive things to come out of The Village was that Shyamalan first worked with a young Bryce Dallas Howard, who would take on another lead role in Shyamalan's follow-up film.