the 10 worst films i saw in 2025
WARNING: THERE WILL BE SPOILERS FOR SOME OF THE FILMS LISTED. AND STRANGER THINGS SEASON 5. I PROMISE IT MAKES SENSE.
Introduction
So,
first year that I'm doing this. Maybe if it continues I'd do some
paragraph here outlining my thoughts on the year as a whole outside of
film, but you don't need someone else telling you how bad this year was,
you know. In terms of film however, I'd say this was one of the
strongest years we've had in a while. With one pretty notable exception,
all of the really great films were pretty close in quality so I had a
hard time deciding what order to put things in. Also, with all of the
well-recieved films coming out this year (and the fact that I had more
time to see stuff this year) there ended up being some pretty big
surprises, with sleeper hits I ended up loving, acclaimed films that
didn't land with me and a rare year where most of the divisive films I
saw didn't end up landing for me.
But of course, this is the one where I talk about all of the bad (subjective) films that I watched this year and, I'll be honest, this was a breath of fresh air after last year. Maybe it's just that I wasn't actively seeking out as many bad films as I was last year, maybe my tastes have changed, maybe real life has got the point where it's so bad that anything looks better in comparison. Who knows. That being said, not everything could hit for me. Case in point: the films I'm gonna be talking about here.
Heads up: if you really liked any of these films, good. Art is subjective and I'm glad you could find more enjoyment in these films than I did.
Also, there's a lot of films I just flat out didn't watch this year, so if there's a glaring omission then that's probably why. (Electric State, any MCU film, Until Dawn, Hurry Up Tomorrow, Lilo and Stitch, I Know What You Did Last Summer, The Strangers: Chapter 2, etc.)
Honourable Mentions
Before I get into the main list, I'd like to mention the films that were just good enough to avoid the cut:
- Avatar: Fire and Ash - The only film I saw this year that literally gave me a migraine and made me feel like I was on the verge of throwing up for two hours (I had to walk out of it because I was physically unable to finish it, so it doesn't count)
- Wolf Man + The Strangers: Chapter 2 - I was unable to get more than 5 mins into either of these, so they don't count.
- Fear Street: Prom Queen - Eh, I had fun with it. Sure, it's a massive step down from what I believe to be the best trilogy of modern horror history (28 Years Later pending), but I thought it was an enjoyable, albeit brainless slasher.
- Marty Supreme - Ok, this is absolutely a me problem, but Marty as a protagonist starts to become impossible to empathise with. Then again, it is still incredibly paced and directed and scored and acted, it's just the story that's being paced, directed, scored and acted isn't really something that I could resonate with or even really get that much enjoyment about.
- Five Nights At Freddy's 2 - Ok, sure, it's horrifically written, makes no sense, tonally inconsistent and weirdly paced, but I got enough ironic enjoyment out of it to like it. I went to see a FNAF film, I got exactly what I was expecting.
- Jurassic World: Rebirth - The first 40-50 minutes of this are really rough - which is why it's here - but once the action starts to kick in and the dinosaurs come into things then it finally serves to remind people why this franchise is so successful.
- Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning - I probably just don't like these films. It's got some really tense scenes and Tom Cruise doing what he does, but I just couldn't bring myself to care about the world-ending plot here and, if I'm gonna be honest, I think we're past these big "America First" blockbusters. Same reason I've stopped engaging with the MCU recently.
- Keeper - I'll be honest, this was close to making the list, but it was a decent enough watch that I gave it just enough credit to keep it out of the list itself.
10: The Monkey
Speaking of Osgood Perkins...
Yeah, this was a rough year to be following Osgood Perkins. As someone who loved Longlegs, I was really excited to watch The Monkey and the trailers and their manic, violent energy only hooked me in further. Unfortunately, in my eyes, the film wasn't able to capture that. Sure, when it gets violent it gets really good and starts to deliver, but the rest of the film is nowhere near as engaging as the marketing showed it to be (again with this guy). The worst thing a film like this can do is bore me, and by god did this film start to bore me in some stretches. Granted, I get the story that Osgood Perkins was trying to tell here and it's a great theme, it's just that the script wasn't really there to make me feel those emotions.
Though, to be fair, I think the main reason I put this one in over Keeper is because of Final Destination: Bloodlines. Unfortunately, the premise of this one was always gonna draw comparisons to the Final Destination films, and had it stood alone this year I think I wouldn't have questioned it as much. However, of course, Final Destination not only broke a 14 year hiatus this year but put out the best film of the entire franchise that just happened to handle the same themes that The Monkey does, making it feel much more inferior in comparison.
Honestly, I'm not gonna fully bash this one because I don't think it's actually that bad. I think that if I wasn't making this a full top 10, I'd probably have put this as an honourable mention. However, I didn't and all the other films had something just putting it over this, so it just kinda sits here as a mildly forgettable, underwhelming horror film from the early months of the year.
Please take a breather Osgood, you clearly need it.
9: Snow White
Yeah, this early on in the list, shocking.
Now, whilst there's definitely a case to say that Snow White is one of the worst films on this list, I'll admit that it doesn't really do anything shocking in either direction and the films with higher highs on this list had - in my opinion - much lower lows. This film is weak, which is why its here, but it's not terrible.
First things first: everyone who tells you this film failed because of Rachel Zegler did not watch it. Zegler is by far the standout of the entire film and whilst I'm hesitant to say that she was the only one trying, she was very clearly the one trying the most. That being said, she can't work miracles and the script she's given to work with does her absolutely no favours. The writing here is really rough and never truly gains the confidence to do something interesting with the 109 minutes they have.
However, even if it did, then Zegler wouldn't have the co-stars to make it work on screen. I know it's the easiest target for anyone talking about this film for reasons both on and off the screen, but Gal Gadot puts in what might be the worst performance of the year here. She's emotionless, completely unconvincing, unfortunately unintimidating for a Disney villain and just comes across passionless even for this film. Though, of course, the Evil Queen isn't the only other major character in the film, there's also the dwarves... unfortunately. I don't know what they were thinking when they thought that CGI dwarves were a good idea, especially when they look as horrifying as the ones in this film did.
Speaking of the issue with the dwarves, I might as well try tackle the whole nightmare surrounding this film politically. First off, the Zegler stuff doesn't even need to be dignified with a response. That was a dumb movement started by some of the worst parts of the online film community and there's no point in taking it seriously. The Dinklage stuff? I don't have dwarfism so I don't feel confident in talking about that, but I can see where both sides are coming from as someone who is disabled in other areas. I can get how, for some people like Dinklage, the film and the characters of the dwarves perpetuated stereotypes about real people with dwarfism. That being said, I don't think the CGI route was the right way to go with the story. Probably because I don't think making it a Snow White film was the right way to go with the story.
Remember that whole thing where the Daily Mail put out a false story that the dwarves had been cut? Well, in retrospect, I think that would have actually led to a better film. Cut out the Snow White aspects (including the dwarves) and limit it to just the story about the princess and the rebel group and I think they'd have had something here. Honestly, this could have been a great original Disney Princess story (with a better writing team, better Evil Queen and better songs), however that's not the path Disney took, with the path they chose instead leading them here.
Just don't butcher Tangled.
8: Bugonia
So, remember what I said about films not landing for me?
Bugonia is probably the most complicated film I've mentioned on this list because of how many things it excels at. The acting is great, this film looks incredible, the score for this one was amazing and to be fair, if I was doing this objectively I'd have left it off the list entirely. However, I am definitely not an objective person when it comes to film. I can love it in so many different areas, but if there's a few elements that really frustrate me, it can overrule my thoughts on the film entirely and that's what Bugonia did.
So, how does Bugonia go about it? Well, its first issue is trying to do everything at once. "Here's a plotline about how conspiracies can take hold of people" Ok, that point actually landed really well, if the film is just about that then- "Also it's about how capitalism is destroying the environment" Oh, ok, like, yeah it is, so is this gonna tie into the other- "And it's about the class system" I feel like this is getting to be too much- "And the healthcare system is bad" There's like three different films here now- "Here's commentary on how companies try to whitewash their shadier elements" Yeah there's too much here.
You know what the worst part of that is? The conspiracy stuff and the health stuff is actually incredibly good, so good that if the film was just that then it'd be challenging for the best list. However, because it tries to stuff everything in, it weakens both of those points whilst not adding anything substantial to the table.
Then we get to the ending. She's an alien. The conspiracy was right. At that point, the film completely ruined anything it was trying to say, because it just ends up vindicating Jesse Plemons' character and undercutting the entire point of his character before alien Emma Stone ends the world as a "failed experiment" point in what is genuinely one of the most frustrating endings to a film I've seen in a long time. I hate to use the p-word here, but god did I find this one pretentious.
Enjoy the Best Picture nom, Yorgos.
7: Mickey 17
Oh wow, another divisive "topical" film, woooooo...
Whilst this is a similar case to Bugonia (mostly good elements, some glaring issues that ruined it for me), Mickey 17 does not have as much going for it. Pattinson, Ackie and Ruffalo give this film their all, the VFX and Production Design are good and the thesis of using cloning to critique capitalism is genuinely a great concept. Unfortunately, the film falls apart from there.
First off, Mickey 17 offers an off-beat, absurdist type of comedy that - at least for me - doesn't land at all. Whilst this seems like it should be done in an attempt to take the edge off of the dark subject matter, not only does it weaken what was a strong concept, it just makes it feel like the film is ill-equipped to talk about the topics it tries to talk about.
Speaking of being ill-equipped, we now come to the character that landed this film on the list: Kai. Kai is a bisexual woman, the only queer character in the entire film, who starts the film with her girlfriend being killed on a mission with Mickey. Then there's a scene later where Marshall (not-Trump) tries to encourage Mickey and Kai to have sex as some sort of racial purity breeding thing. This, in concept, should be horrifying. A man with a black girlfriend and a grieving queer woman are probably the two most unsettling characters in the film that could have been put in this situation.
Then they completely ruin it.
Turns out, Kai actually does have feelings for Mickey and tries to force him into having sex with her. He rejects her, then she ends up siding with the fascist against him. Now, there's a lot of things wrong with this arc, whether it be the blatant biphobia of making the only bisexual solely focused on an unconsensual lust for the male main character which leans into a whole bunch of problematic stereotypes or the fact that even placing her on the side of the fascist means that the story just bypasses Kai's struggles as a queer woman and how that would factor into Marshall's plan. It's a shockingly ignorant and clumsy move from a director who's clearly so much better than that.
If you'd have told me that the follow-up to Parasite would make this list in December 2024, I wouldn't have believed you. But here we are.
6: The Thursday Murder Club
Full disclosure: I haven't read the book. I know a lot of the things I'm about to talk about were changed from it, though, so maybe I should.
For the first 90 mins of this thing, I was actually enjoying it. Up to that point it was a decent enough murder mystery, the cast was fun and the plot was lightly engaging enough to keep me guessing. It certainly wasn't gonna be anything I'd have been shouting from the rooftops about, but if they pull the reveal off then it'd be a solid 7/10.
Yeah... they didn't.
The first twist I'm gonna talk about is the second one we find out about. Penny, a former police inspector, killed a man in 1973 after he got away with murder himself, then her husband John murdered Ian Ventham in the modern day to protect her secret. This plotline ends with the Thursday Murder Club saying that they'll report it and letting John and Penny do a MURDER-SUICIDE TO AVOID BEING ARRESTED. This is completely unnecessary to the plot, but the film decides explicitly to condemn Penny and John taking the law into their own hands when it fails to stop an actual abuser, which would be a shaky message normally but becomes much worse when you realise that the Thursday Murder Club has been taking the law into their own hands the entire film... and the twist that put the film this low on my list.
The main mystery of The Thursday Murder Club is "who killed Tony Curran?", the owner of the retirement home the film takes place in. This leads the club to uncover the criminal world Curran was tied to, including Bobby Turner. Then we discover that Curran and Turner trafficked workers to the UK and forced them to work for him... one of which being Bogdan, a major character within the film and Curran's killer. So, how is this resolved? The club blackmails Turner into saving the retirement home, whilst Bogdan is arrested for murder. This means that, not only did they force John and Penny into suicide for their vigilante justice, but they CHOOSE TO LET A HUMAN TRAFFICKER WALK FREE AND CONTINUE HUMAN TRAFFICKING.
That's not even mentioning the fact that a British film making the killer a migrant at a time where racist and anti-immigration rhetoric is at its highest was by far the worst possible direction they could have taken with the reveal. To be fair, I can't really put that on them, but I do know that the book handled it so much better so I can raise my eyebrows at least slightly at that.
Actually, if anything, I think that the same easy-going nature of the film I mentioned at the beginning as something personal might have been the downfall of this one. Throughout the film, through the discussion of how older people are treated by society, the fact that one of the main characters was a union leader and prominent in the 80s strikes, the links to immigration and the incompetence and arrogance (and misogyny) within the police force, this film needed to actually say something strong to justify all of that, but it just says nothing. Depiction without commentary is basically meaningless, as was this film.
You know what? Maybe I will read the book. It can only go up from here.
5: A House of Dynamite
Kathryn Bigelow's a director I knew I probably won't like. I've never watched her stuff and I've heard enough about it to know that's they're probably not my type of film. That being said, as someone who was following the Oscar race, this one popped up on the scene and the concept caught my eye: a nuke gets launched at the US, watch three different stages of command react to it. Seemed like an interesting idea, so the day it came out on Netflix I booted it up.
I was wrong.
Turns out, repeating the same premise three times in a row with no further innovation on the idea doesn't exactly make for the most engaging watch. Around the time round three started, I was pretty much starting to check out. Then, of course, there's the matter of that ending. As with everything with this one, I could see the vision, which made it all the more frustrating when it turned out to be a bad idea the whole time. If you're gonna show something three times, denying any actual closure just makes the entire thing feel pointless.
Although, even if the film had shown the impact or the President's choice, it'd still have felt pointless. If you're gonna make a film about the threat of nuclear warfare, you have to earn it. Oppenheimer earned it through the commentary on humanity giving itself the power to destroy the world, Threads earned it through a harrowing showcase of a the true effect of a nuclear strike on civilians, hell even Godzilla Minus One earned it through making it a representation of the trauma that Japan faced after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A House of Dynamite, though, is more interested in operating as a fly on the wall and getting lost within its own framing device to ever truly question what it's talking about. If anything, I think it lets itself off way too lightly. America's foreign policy is never strongly questioned, making the strike come from an anonymous source gives the film an excuse not to delve too much into any tensions leading towards the strike and the procedural technique focuses way too much on the "how" and nowhere near enough on the "why".
Safe to say, this one wasn't getting nominated for anything any time soon.
4: A Minecraft Movie
This one was actually pretty hard to place. There were glimpses where I started to buy into the charm of this one, Zero to Hero did actually end up on repeat on my Spotify for a week and this was a film that's great to joke about. Also, this film probably has the best scene from something on this list, funnily enough being the scene where Zero to Hero plays. That being said, much like many of the films I have on this list (and most true in this case), the stuff I didn't like, I absolutely hated.
I couldn't really get myself on board with any of the characters in this one. Garrett seemed flat, I'd seen Henry's character done better hundreds of times before, Natalie and Dawn never get given the time to make you care about them (we'll get there) and Steve is just Jack Black. Then, in what should be a cardinal sin, the film adaptation of one of the most pro-creativity games ever uses one of the most cookie-cutter, formulaic plots it could possibly gone with. However, the reason why it's this low is a bit more complicated.
To illustrate my point, I'm gonna use two things from 2025 that caused absolutely no controversy or debate whatsoever: Stranger Things and FNAF 2. One of the positives FNAF 2 had - and the thing that kept it off my list - was that, for all its flaws, it was still a FNAF film and fed its core fanbase. Meanwhile, if we look at Stranger Things Season 5 Vol. 2 + 3, it left its queer audience (the same outcast audience the show appealed to initially) feeling betrayed, having been strung along by the show's creators and Netflix's marketing team with the promise of further representation only to not only have the main queer ship of the show taken out, but for the actual canon queer ship to be left "up to interpretation" whilst their straight counterparts get explicit confirmation. What I'm highlighting here is when a piece of media misunderstands the audience it's going for, it can ruin itself entirely. A Minecraft Movie is one of the worst examples of this.
First off, a significant amount of Minecraft's player base is female, which makes the film's intent to only apply to men even worse. Whilst all the male characters spend the runtime on the adventure, the two women in the Minecraft world are left on their own to build, interact with the animals and talk to each other about the men. If nobody ever looked further into that then that's a pretty big oversight and if it was intentional then that's even worse.
But also, there's the whole "outcast" element of this film. Minecraft, like FNAF and Stranger Things, has a pretty significant neurodivergent and queer side of the fanbase, which has led to people being bullied for that, which I unfortunately know from experience. All three of those pieces of media approached it differently: the FNAF films remained earnest to the games they were adapting, "cringe" elements and all. Stranger Things shifted further into the mainstream, abandoning its core ideals. A Minecraft Movie, however, ended up joining in the ridicule itself.
I'm not saying that I wanted this film to be serious, there's no way to seriously adapt Minecraft into a film, but what Hess does is try to deliberately make a "so bad it's good" film (something you're not supposed to force), leading to the film itself showing a frustrating lack of interest in or enjoyment of the source material. Chief amongst all of this, the Chicken Jockey cinema thing that happened. Whilst it did start mostly organically, Hess himself endorsing the trend where people were literally yelling and throwing food and drink during a film wasn't just disrespectful to the medium he was working within (telling people to put cinema workers through that is in general a dick move), but also the key message to those same outcast fans of the game that "this isn't for you." He was turning that safe space for those fans into another place for their interests to be turned into a joke.
I understand most people don't see this film like that. I know that some of those same fans that I'm talking about did end up really enjoying this film anyway and got in on the chicken jockey jokes as well. Also, I'm fully aware that this is a kids blockbuster first and foremost, although that does ignore the fact that the game's fanbase outside of kids was accounted for as well through the stuff I outlined in the last two paragraphs (also don't get me started on the "it's just a kids film" argument). But at least to me, this wasn't a movie for those kids who grew up getting bullied for playing Minecraft. It was for the people who bullied them.
3: Holland
In recent years I started to gain a new favourite genre: feminist horror with a twist that sends it completely off the rails. Fresh kicked things off in 2022, Barbarian built it incredibly and it hit its highest point yet this year with Companion. So, when I heard that Mimi Cave, the director of Fresh and the woman who introduced me to this sub-genre, was finally releasing her second film, I was in.
Well, here we are.
In by far the film's most shocking twist, it doesn't really say anything meaningful. Fresh was about fears surrounding dating for women, Barbarian was about a lot of things but mostly about the differences between men and women reacting to danger and Companion was an examination of a toxic relationship as well as being one of the best examinations of incels ever made (spoiler for the best list, btw, Companion is on there). Holland, if you can say it has a theme, is about feeling insecure in a restrictively traditional relationship and men lying to the women in their lives, but it's more interested in trying to be a romantic thriller than tackling those themes in the head-on way that its contemporaries do. But even then, the romance is so flat and chemistry-less that it feels like a waste and the so-called thrills from this film are nowhere to be found.
Maybe this was partly because I was waiting for a "HOLY S**T" twist that never came, but that's not entirely my fault. The entire film feels like the facade that the first 30 minutes of a better film would fool you into, before the rest of the film changes completely into something much more fun and interesting. Whilst we do get that twist revealed in the last 15 minutes of the film, it's nowhere near as interesting as it needs to be to justify dragging the audience through the slog it took us to get there.
Don't watch this. In fact, I'm just gonna tell you everything: He's a serial killer. That's the twist. She thinks he's seeing someone, then she sees someone herself, then we find out the husband's a serial killer. Then he kills the guy his wife is seeing. Then she kills him. Also the town is uncannily perfect, which is actually an interesting premise to explore- and the film's over before we could touch on any of that.
Just watch Companion. Or Fresh again.
2: War of the Worlds
Look, what can I actually say about this one that hasn't been said already? A screenlife alien invasion film was a cool idea on paper but a horrible one in execution. The acting was laughable, the product placement was some of the worst I've ever experienced, the CGI was horrific, using real conflicts in the film was misguided at best and brutally tone-deaf at worst and all of that's before you realise that they're butchering one of the best alien novels ever to make this.
But, like, that's it. If you look at most of the segments I've written for this article, they've all had something passionate for me to get mad at. The endings of Thursday Murder Club and Bugonia, the queer representation in Mickey 17, the lack of meaningful commentary in A House of Dynamite and Holland, the insincere adaptations of A Minecraft Movie, all of the previous films had something that infuriated me enough to tear into them, except for The Monkey and Snow White, which placed much lower on the list. War of the Worlds gives no positives, so I couldn't really justify ranking this any higher than I did, but I felt absolutely nothing watching it. Not anger, not boredom, not even any ironic enjoyment. It's just a pointless, terribly made, soulless Amazon ad. That's it. Because of that, I don't want to call it my personal worst film of 2025.
It does help though that the actual number one was much worse anyway.
1: Marching Powder
Ok, let's start in 2024 with a slightly better movie: Joker: Folie A Deux, where I got a trailer for a new Danny Dyer film about football hooliganism and apparently also romance. Instantly, I could tell that I probably wouldn't like it. For any non-British readers, football hooliganism is basically when intense fans of football clubs go to matches intending to get violent with supporters of their opponents. Safe to say, I wasn't exactly the target demographic. So, I did the only rational thing I could do in that scenario...
Get morbidly curious, watch it anyway, get surprised at just how bad it is.
But dear god, was I not expecting this film to be THAT bad.
The literal first thing this film does is tell a transphobic joke. Within ten seconds, I knew where this film's priorities lied. But I kept going.
I kept going through the opening scene which then used the T-slur.
I kept going through the main character (Jack)'s smug, irritating and Gervais-ian attempts at comedy and inability to commit to fixing his mistakes.
I kept going through the film's attempts to gaslight me into thinking his wife deserved someone like him.
I kept going as the morality of this film just drove further and further into the ground.
I kept going through every jab at "wokeness", sensitivity, feminists, vegans and any other easy targets that edgy comedy like this goes for instantly.
I kept going through the part where Jack literally leaves his 10 year old (I think) son home alone to watch porn and overdose on cocaine, then the film STILL EXPECTS YOU TO ROOT FOR HIM.
And after it all, I kept going up to the end, where Jack barely learns a single thing, ends the same we he began, except now everyone has forgiven him for the habits he hasn't left behind because he did the bare minimum once.
This is the worst type of comedy film. It's needlessly edgy, tries to manipulate you into liking a horrible person who doesn't change and plays into the culture war instead of doing anything interesting with the plot. There's a joke in here about Andrew Tate and lesbians and Tate comes off better from it, which is never the angle you wanna take in anything.
I think that, somewhere early on in production, this was conceived as a commentary on toxic masculinity. Dyer clearly isn't the type of guy who'd endorse what Jack does and I'm not sure Nick Love would either. But the film loses itself in the "lad"-ish, hooligan culture, romanticising it and eventually just becoming the exact thing it was trying to criticise.
Whatever this film's intentions were though, it still ended up an insufferable, pointless, morally butchered and needlessly edgy cinematic disaster. I may have had more to say about some of the other films on this list, but when it came to the top spot, there was no competition whatsoever. Marching Powder was, by far, the worst film of 2025.
Conclusion...
Well, that was good to get off my chest. However, whilst this year had a lot of lows, the highs were much higher. Sure, it's fun to rant about the bad stuff, but it is so much better to be positive about stuff.
So, see you soon for my top 18 films of 2025.
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