Every year, a handful of films arrive with loud marketing, recognizable stars, and just enough promise to get audiences into seats. Some deliver. Others leave people staring at the credits wondering where the last two hours of their life went. The movies on this list belong firmly in that second category.
What follows is a collection of films that viewers, critics, and the box office itself largely rejected. Some were anticipated sequels, others were franchise spinoffs, a few were original misfires. All of them earned a reputation as a genuine waste of time, and for reasons that are worth understanding.
1. Madame Web (2024)
Earning only $17.6 million for its domestic opening weekend, Madame Web became the worst-performing Spider-Man related film in history. It scored only 13 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, earning the lowest critic score of any major superhero film in nearly a decade. The film was skewered with comically terrible reviews, and audiences responded with a dismal “C+” CinemaScore.
Widely considered the worst of both bad Sony movies and bad comic book movies, the film takes a giant crap on several well-known characters and further tarnishes the rotting corpse that is the Sony Spider-Man Universe. Its poor critical performance and extremely muted audience reception highlighted some genuine pitfalls of the superhero genre. Strangely, the same film became one of Netflix’s biggest streaming hits later that year, suggesting some viewers chose curiosity over caution.
2. Joker: Folie à Deux (2024)
Todd Phillips’ sequel bombed in its box office debut with a domestic opening of $37.8 million, well behind expectations, and became the first Hollywood comic book movie in history to earn a D CinemaScore from audiences. After critics and audiences flat out rejected the big-budget tentpole, which received a 33 percent “rotten” average on Rotten Tomatoes, it shaped up to be one of the year’s biggest catastrophes, poised to lose at least $150 million to $200 million in its theatrical run.
The film was poorly received by critics and became a box-office bomb, grossing $208 million on a $190 to $200 million budget. Among its seven Golden Raspberry Award nominations, it won Worst Remake, Rip-off or Sequel and Worst Screen Combo for Phoenix and Gaga. A source close to the production deemed the release a “complete audience rejection.”
3. The Crow (2024)
The long-anticipated reboot of the 1994 cult classic had big shoes to fill since the original is still beloved to this day. Unfortunately, fans were left bitterly disappointed. Starring Bill Skarsgard as the titular vigilante and alternative pop singer FKA Twigs, the 2024 reimagining was a commercial and critical bomb.
With about 15 years in development hell, The Crow had plenty of time to conjure up a compelling update. That didn’t seem to be the case, since the results were nothing more than soulless and shallow. Few reboots have faced quite this level of audience hostility, particularly from fans of the original who felt the film missed the entire point of what made Brandon Lee’s version so resonant.
4. Harold and the Purple Crayon (2024)
The 2024 film took the charming simplicity of the 1955 children’s book and spewed out a baffling mix of live-action and animation. Instead of keeping the whimsical innocence that comes from a child’s imagination, the movie reimagines Harold as an adult man played by Zachary Levi, who uses the titular crayon to escape into the real world. What follows is a dull and confusing journey that feels unattached from the endearing spirit that made the original so beloved.
Harold and the Purple Crayon’s attempt to inject maturity into a classic children’s tale only results in a lifeless and uninspired mess. For something meant to celebrate creativity and imagination, the film lacks either of those things and only makes audiences wonder what the point was. The plot is half-hearted at best, the visuals lack vibrancy, and Levi’s performance is more irritating than entertaining.
5. Reagan (2024)
Rather than presenting a nuanced, unbiased take on Ronald Reagan’s life and presidency, the film depicts him as a hero to worship by erasing his controversies and glossing over critical aspects of his career. This lack of depth leaves Reagan feeling more like a glorified biography than a serious exploration of a political figure. Despite spending years being developed, the biopic fails to deliver meaningful insights and would rather rush the narrative so that audiences see an idolized version of the 40th President.
Dennis Quaid gives an earnest performance as the titular president, but even his efforts can’t save the one-dimensional script or biased direction. If someone is a fan of Ronald Reagan, the film can provide a decent level of nostalgia. Those wanting a balanced perspective will be disappointed, finding only a hollow and unconvincing story instead of an accurate biopic.
6. Lift (2024)
Lift stars Kevin Hart leading a ragtag group of thieves who need to steal money or gold off a moving airplane from a group of ne’er-do-wellers. The premise had just enough surface-level appeal to attract a Netflix audience, but viewers who showed up quickly realized the execution was far emptier than the logline suggested. The film is stale, uninspired, and without a shred of memorability, making it exactly the kind of forgotten waste of time that vanishes from cultural memory almost immediately.
What made Lift particularly frustrating for viewers wasn’t that it was offensively bad, but that it was almost impressively forgettable. It occupied time without filling it with anything of value. Kevin Hart can carry a comedy, but no amount of charm saves a script that has nothing interesting to say.
7. Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (2023)
Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania was marketed as the start of something big. Instead, it was two hours of setup. There was no payoff, no momentum, just a sequence of scenes wrapped in swirling effects and exposition. Marvel presented the film as a pivot point for its Phase 5 storyline, which only deepened audience frustration when the movie delivered almost nothing of substance.
The film’s heavy reliance on CGI worlds and universe-building chatter alienated casual viewers while failing to satisfy dedicated fans. Every Marvel and superhero movie that launched in 2024’s broader cycle was treated as a massive bust by audiences and analysts alike. Quantumania was perhaps the clearest early warning sign that the formula was running dry.
8. The Matrix Resurrections (2021)
The Matrix Resurrections tried to outsmart the idea of sequels while being one. The action was sluggish. The commentary felt tired. Instead of reinventing the franchise, it spun in circles, stuck between sincerity and self-parody. It had been nearly two decades since the original trilogy closed out, and audiences had been hoping for something genuinely revelatory.
What they got instead was a film that seemed to be arguing, at length, about why it shouldn’t exist. That’s an interesting concept in theory. In practice, many viewers found it excruciating to sit through. The franchise’s legacy arguably suffered more from this entry than from anything that came before it.
9. Poolman (2024)
Although the film’s director Chris Pine’s passion for filmmaking was visible, Poolman showcased how difficult it is to replicate the magic of beloved neo-noirs. The uneven pacing, forced humor, and lack of narrative focus turned what could have been a quirky cult classic into one of 2024’s biggest disappointments. If anything, Poolman can be seen as a lesson in prioritizing substance over style.
Pine had long been seen as a credible creative force behind the camera, which made the film’s failure land harder than a typical misfire. Critics weren’t unkind out of spite. They were disappointed because the ambition was visible but the delivery was simply not there. Audiences felt the same way, and word-of-mouth dried up quickly.
10. The Woman in the Yard (2025)
One horror movie that was previously highly anticipated didn’t scare audiences so much as scare them away. Released on March 28, 2025, The Woman in the Yard earned the lowest Popcornmeter score on Rotten Tomatoes for the year, with a disappointing 47 percent from general audiences. The movie also came in at a rough 44 percent on the Tomatometer based on more than 60 reviews.
That’s a pretty definitive “meh” from both audiences and critics. According to audience reviews, many found the film’s slow-burn plot “boring,” and were frustrated by the movie’s “open-ended” finale and lack of “details.” Horror is a genre where a single effective scene can save an otherwise uneven film. This one apparently couldn’t manage even that.
11. Peter Pan and Wendy (2023)
Disney’s live-action retreads landed in a deeply uncanny space. Peter Pan and Wendy looked polished on the surface but felt emotionally hollow. It served nostalgia without any of the flavor. The studio released it directly to Disney Plus rather than theaters, a decision that perhaps said more than any review could about the confidence behind the project.
The film had the visual resources of a major studio production and a story that generations of children already loved. Somehow it managed to drain all the wonder out of both. Viewers who grew up on the animated original mostly felt the live-action update had nothing to offer them, and younger audiences showed little interest either.
12. War of the Worlds (2025)
Ice Cube stars in War of the Worlds, which landed on Rotten Tomatoes’ all-time worst list on account of its zero percent Tomatometer score after 20 reviews. It joins Sylvester Stallone’s Alarum as a 2025 entry on that list. The critics’ consensus described it as “stranding Ice Cube in an inept screensaver with wall-to-wall product placement.”
A zero percent score on any major review aggregator is genuinely rare. It requires every single critic who reviewed the film to find nothing worth recommending, which is a remarkable feat by any measure. Among the rottenest of the rotten, films that score below four percent on the Tomatometer all have at least 20 reviews, ensuring the movies on that list have inflicted a minimum threshold of agony. War of the Worlds cleared that bar without any apparent difficulty.
There’s a certain honesty in how audiences respond to disappointment at the movies. They don’t always need a film to be perfect, but they do need to feel like their time meant something. The movies on this list, for all their differences in budget and ambition, share one common thread: they asked for two hours and gave almost nothing in return.
