Word.ws English Dictionary

movie jail

movie jail noun: a state of derailment of a career or limited opportunities to which a film industry professional is seemingly relegated, usually as a result of making an unsuccessful film.

Noun

movie jail (uncountable)

  1. (idiomatic, informal) A state of derailment of a career or limited opportunities to which a film industry professional is seemingly relegated, usually as a result of making an unsuccessful film.
    • "They have this term in Hollywood, movie jail. When a director does this horrible movie that fails, he's in movie jail, where they're not letting him make another movie again."2010, Alison Macor, Chainsaws, Slackers, and Spy Kids: Thirty Years of Filmmaking in Austin, Texas., University of Texas Press
    • 2016, June 10, "10 Actors Who Got Sent to Movie Jail", Screen Rant.

Questions about movie jail

What does movie jail mean?
Movie jail means a state of derailment of a career or limited opportunities to which a film industry professional is seemingly relegated, usually as a result of making an unsuccessful film.
What part of speech is movie jail?
Movie jail is a noun.

Words near movie jail in the dictionary

  1. movie hopped
  2. movie hopping
  3. movie hops
  4. movie house
  5. movie houses
  6. movie jail
  7. movie palace
  8. movie palaces
  9. movie projector
  10. movie projectors
  11. movie rights

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: movie jail (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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