In many ways, the news about movie-going this year (yes, I’m talking about the Paramount/Netflix/Warner Bros. Discovery mess) was worse than the actual 2025 movies themselves. But don’t worry, there were still plenty of on-screen catastrophes, too – the kinds of films that make you wonder if anyone inside of the industry actually cares about the medium, or if it’s perhaps just a giant money-laundering operation.
For those who avoided the titles below, consider yourself lucky.* For the filmmakers and studios responsible, let this serve as a well-deserved public shaming. (*And for the record, I was able to dodge some of the more disreputable titles of the past 12 months, including the Ice Cube-led remake of War of the Worlds, Five Nights at Freddy’s 2, The Strangers: Chapter 2, and The Weeknd’s vanity project Hurry Up Tomorrow. Call it luck, call it prescience. I’m simply calling it a win.)
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Mark Wahlberg stars as Daryl in Mel Gibson’s Flight Risk.Courtesy of Lionsgate/Lionsgate
10. Flight Risk
This feels like low-hanging fruit: a C-tier thriller starring a wildly miscast Mark Wahlberg as a southern-fried assassin and directed by Mel Gibson, who is a long way from Braveheart. It might’ve worked as an unintentionally hilarious diversion had Gibson not made every single wrong directorial decision along the way. From the casting to the action to the visual effects to the score, the film seems intent on identifying and then grinding down every element that makes a movie tolerable, forget even baseline entertaining.
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Paul Rudd and Jenna Ortega play a father-daughter duo in A24’s Death of a Unicorn.Balazs Goldi/The Associated Press
9. Death of a Unicorn
A pharmaceutical-industry satire so flaccid that it’s in desperate need of Viagra, Death of a Unicorn is destined to fade into the mythical margins of cinematic history, with future moviegoers convinced that – like its title creature – the film never really existed at all. Wasting a perfectly game cast (Paul Rudd, Jenna Ortega, Richard E. Grant) and a semi-promising premise pivoting on the magical properties of a unicorn’s horn, Alex Scharfman’s feature directorial debut doesn’t know what it wants to do or say, resulting in several narrative and thematic threads that go nowhere, slowly.
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Chris Evans and Anya Taylor-Joy in Sacrifice.Elevation Pictures
8. Sacrifice
Never before has there been a harder drop-off in ambition and artistry than the plunge that director Romain Gavras took this year, going from his exhilarating 2022 political thriller Athena to this insultingly empty-headed satire about a movie star (Chris Evans, a long way from Captain America to say nothing of his far better work as another empty-headed celeb in Scott Pilgrim vs. The World) forced to walk into a volcano by eco-terrorists. Or something. There’s a reason that almost no one outside of those attending its TIFF premiere have heard, or will ever hear, about it.
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Sean Bean and Daniel Day-Lewis in Ronan Day-Lewis and Daniel Day-Lewis’ Anemone.Courtesy of Focus Features/The Associated Press
7. Anemone
Nepotism isn’t exactly a fresh phenomenon when it comes to showbiz, but it reached dreadful new heights-slash-depths with this dirge of a drama. Essentially a make-work project for the Day-Lewis clan, marking both the feature directorial debut of young visual artist Ronan and the long-awaited return of his ostensibly retired papa, Daniel (who hasn’t been on screen since 2017’s Phantom Thread), Anemone fails to rise above bog-standard family melodrama, with its exhausting, circular ruminations about intergenerational trauma and guilt.
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Emma Stone in her second Yorgos Lanthimos film collaboration, Bugonia.The Associated Press
6. Bugonia
What began as a sporadically fizzy collaboration between director Yorgos Lanthimos and Emma Stone with 2018’s The Favourite has now metastasized into a four-film reign of terror, pockmarking the actress’s otherwise impeccable career and producing some of the most egregiously annoying faux-prestige films in recent years. And with the unbearable Bugonia, which is two hours of ritual humiliation and contempt for the audience, Lanthimos has also roped in poor Jesse Plemons, too.
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Kerry Washington plays black-ops specialist Kyrah in Shadow Force.Juan Pablo Gutierrez/Lionsgate/Lionsgate
5. Shadow Force
Every poorly designed, choppily edited and tonally confused action movie is one more chip stacked against a genre that, when steered by artists who know the deep reservoirs of pleasure to be found in creative mayhem, proves the fundamental power of the cinematic medium. A bad action movie isn’t just disappointing – it’s an affront to the reason that so many of us go to the movies. Which brings us to Joe Carnahan’s Shadow Force, an action flick that is so lazy and dull that it deserves to be buried deep inside any random streaming service’s catalogue, never to be unearthed by even the most indifferent and callous what-to-watch-next algorithm.
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John Goodman voices Papa Smurf in the 2025 animated Smurfs movie.Paramount Animation/Supplied
4. Smurfs
If you can’t Smurf anything nice, then don’t Smurf anything at all. Such was the key lesson to be taken away by parents after being dragged by their children to yet another big-screen adaptation of everyone’s second-favourite blue-man group earlier this summer. This is the kind of bottom-of-the-intellectual-property-barrel kiddie flick that gives AI slop a good name.
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Danny Ramirez and Anthony Mackie in Marvel Studios’ Captain America: Brave New World.Eli Adé/The Associated Press
3. Captain America: Brave New World
The Marvel Cinematic Universe might well recover when Avengers: Doomsday opens this time next year. But the entire enterprise was nearly killed dead with the politically incoherent and creatively inert Captain America: Brave New World. The janky story consistently comes just up against the edge of an interesting theme before lazily embracing the coward’s way out. This is a movie of pussyfooting and sidestepping, unconcerned with race, history, heroism or any idea at all beyond “Hulk smash.”
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Robert De Niro plays Vito Genovese in Barry Levinson’ The Alto Knights.Jennifer Rose Clasen/Warner Bros. Pictures
2. The Alto Knights
Warner Bros. Discovery titan David Zaslav might be ending the year by nearly destroying the cultural capital of a century-old studio, but he began it by personally shepherding this grey market knock-off of Martin Scorsese’s mafioso canon. Every single beat of The Alto Knights feels like an historical footnote from Goodfellas or The Godfather Part II stretched out to interminable feature length – musty, dusty, dry. Just like Zaslav’s legacy when it comes to the cinematic arts, this is pretty fuggedable.
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Stranger Things star Millie Bobby Brown in The Electric State.PAUL ABELL/Netflix
1. The Electric State
Everything you need to know about Netflix’s ambitions to become a true movie studio can be found in The Electric State, a US$300-million-plus piece of sci-fi nothingness that will short-circuit your brain.
