It’s the end of the year, and while it’s a great time to look back at all the year’s best movies, it’s also time to look back at some of the ones that… well… weren’t so good. Now, “Worst of the Year” lists are sometimes unpopular, as they’re considered mean, but anything that came out in theaters that people were expected to spend money on is fair game. All of the movies on this list are legitimately bad—although if anyone checking out this list really loves (or even likes) any of the movies on it, we’d love to hear from you in the comments. Movies are subjective: I could like a movie, you could hate it (and vice versa), and we’d both be right.
So, without further ado, here are the worst movies of 2025.
10. Ella McKay:
James L. Brooks’ first movie since his disastrous How Do You Know turned out to be an even bigger misfire, which is a shame, as it’s likely the last movie we’ll ever see from the formerly great writer/director behind Terms of Endearment, Broadcast News, and As Good as It Gets. It was meant to launch Emma Mackey as a star, but she’s saddled with a terrible role as perhaps the most unconvincing screen politician in movie history. Jamie Lee Curtis, Ayo Edebiri, Woody Harrelson, and especially Leo Woodall (who, at one point, has to convincingly play a sixteen-year-old) all come across pretty poorly in a movie I’m shocked Disney/20th Century Studios ever greenlit in the first place.
9. Snow White:
While I’ve seen worse movies this year, Snow White kind of sums up exactly what’s wrong with a lot of modern Disney fare, in that there’s no reason for it to exist. The movie was sunk with audiences before it ever hit theaters thanks to the misguided comments of star Rachel Zegler, who threw the original classic—without which modern Disney wouldn’t exist—under the bus. Instead, the movie was given an “empowering” new spin which, truth be told, was done way better not too long ago with Snow White and the Huntsman. It also feels like a movie that was reshot to death (Disney’s other winter misfire, Captain America: Brave New World, suffered the same fate) in order to please the widest audience possible—but in the end, it pleased no one. A lot of folks involved with this one seemed to take a major career hit, not only Zegler but also co-star Gal Gadot, whose performance as the Evil Queen was so abysmal that clips from it have gone viral for all the wrong reasons.
8. Wolf Man:
More than any other movie on this list, Wolf Man should have been good. After all, it was directed by Leigh Whannell, who made the amazing Upgrade and the solid remake of The Invisible Man, which was a huge hit for Blumhouse. The biggest problem with Wolf Man is that it’s not a Wolf Man movie. Nothing of the classic formula remains, with it reimagined as a body-horror movie that more or less rips off The Fly and adds nothing new to the genre. Of all the classic Universal Monsters, the Wolf Man always held the most promise as an antihero, and Whannell’s movie just wastes the opportunity by delivering a boring, thrill-less, wannabe horror movie. It’s a huge waste of stars Christopher Abbott and Julia Garner, the latter of whom has the distinction of appearing in both one of the best horror movies of the year (Weapons) and one of the very worst.
7. Star Trek: Section 31:
Paramount has done a pretty good job harming its Star Trek franchise this year by throwing way too much content out there—whether it justified it or not. The worst of the lot was Star Trek: Section 31, the first Star Trek movie in nine years, but one that was so bad Trekkies everywhere wished it had never been made. It’s a cringe effort that tries to spin off Michelle Yeoh’s antihero from Star Trek: Discovery into her own franchise, which mercifully died once this came out and fans all over slammed it. The trailers certainly didn’t help matters, with someone calling Yeoh a “bad bitch” (admiringly) while a Beyoncé song played in the background. Yep. That’s Star Trek, all right.
6. Holland:
One of the more disappointing film experiences I had this year was with a movie I bet the majority of you have never heard of—Prime Video’s Holland, starring Nicole Kidman, which was buried on streaming after its disastrous SXSW premiere, which I attended. Kidman plays a housewife who becomes suspicious that her husband (Matthew Macfadyen) is cheating on her, only to fall into a ludicrously dark plot that—rather than entertaining anyone—seemed to come out of nowhere. It was a pretty rough follow-up for director Mimi Cave to her excellent horror comedy Fresh. She aims for a Coen Bros. tone filtered through a feminist lens, and… well… it doesn’t quite come off. Hopefully she rebounds with her next movie, as Fresh proved she has a lot of talent. I doubt all of the blame can be laid at her feet.
5. Death of a Unicorn:
This was another huge misfire I caught at SXSW, and part of a rough series of movies put out by A24 during the first half of the year that had many people wondering whether they’d lost their mojo. Luckily, they redeemed themselves with Bring Her Back, Marty Supreme, and a few others. Death of a Unicorn has a cool cast, including Paul Rudd and Jenna Ortega, and a fun premise, but it’s an utterly idiotic attempt at satire, aiming to skewer families like the Sacklers in the most inane, toothless way possible. This was painful to watch.
4. The Electric State:
The Russo Bros. had an embarrassing disaster with this Chris Pratt- and Millie Bobby Brown-led epic that cost a reported $320 million and was seemingly skipped by most Netflix viewers, resulting in one of the streamer’s biggest flops ever. It took a great book by Simon Stålenhag and reimagined it into the most soulless, vapid excuse for a tentpole movie in a year full of them. The only bright side is that—were this not such a disaster in the making (it was delayed a long time)—the Russo Bros. would likely never have returned to the Marvel fold.
3. Hurry Up Tomorrow:
This will no doubt go down as one of the most misguided vanity projects of all time, with The Weeknd starring as himself in this psychological thriller in which he’s taken captive by a crazed fan played by Jenna Ortega. How bad is this movie? Take a shot every time The Weeknd soulfully gazes into the camera and cries. You won’t make it through forty-five minutes, in which case you’ll miss the ending, where Ortega is seemingly cured of her homicidal impulses by the beauty of The Weeknd’s singing.
2. War of the Worlds:
Whose idea was this? Hey—let’s do a new version of War of the Worlds, set entirely online, with Ice Cube as the star. It was very quietly dumped onto streaming after having been shot five years ago, at the height of the pandemic. Yes, the fact that it’s a pandemic movie shot during lockdown partially explains why it feels so homemade and amateur-hour (complete with hilarious product placement), but it should have stayed on the shelf. As much as Amazon tried to bury it, the internet found it, with it becoming one of the most infamously bad films of all time.
1. I Know What You Did Last Summer:
And yet, I wouldn’t say War of the Worlds is a worse movie than the “requel” to I Know What You Did Last Summer. The thing is, unlike War of the Worlds, I Know What You Did Last Summer is a real movie—but it’s also a movie that feels like it was written and directed by people with no appreciation whatsoever for the franchise it’s trying to reignite. The idea to take one of the franchise’s heroes and turn him into the killer was absolutely inane, and horror fans rejected the film so strongly that it’s unlikely any other slasher franchise will ever dare to repeat its mistakes—which is good, as this utterly spat in the faces of all the horror fans who loved the first movie.
And there you have it—that’s my list. What were the worst movies of the year for you? Let us know in the comments!
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