The 10 worst movies of 2025, according to Metacritic
These ten movies got the lowest scores of 2025 among those with seven or more reviews. But are they all that bad?
Rotten Tomatoes may have become a near-universal source for quantifying a film’s critical reception (if not necessarily reading actual criticism). But real ones are always quick to point out that Metacritic scores are actually more nuanced than you might assume. Rather than using a binary thumbs up/thumbs down distinction and reporting the percentage of positive-skewing reviews, Metacritic pulls from a curated pool of reviews and assigns them a rating number out of 100, based on an actual provided rating or approximated based on the review’s content. Then they average those numbers for a more precise reading of the critical consensus.
That doesn’t make a Metacritic score the final word on anything. (Critics would love it if you actually read and engaged with their words, not just their numbers.) But if there’s one thing Metacritic is good at, it’s expressing when a lot of critics think something is very bad. Though the site uses a particular weighting, weeding out any titles with fewer than four reviews, to determine its own Worst of the Year list, they also have a separate list sorting every title with at least seven reviews into a top-to-bottom ranking, which is how we compiled this group of the ten worst movies of 2025.
But sometimes conventional wisdom about a much-hated movie is wrong. So let’s sort through these ten supposedly world-class failures and offer some context on whether they’re quite as lousy as their reputations suggest.
10 Regretting You
Image: Paramount
Metascore: 33
What is it? A romantic melodrama adapted from a Colleen Hoover book, where a tragic car crash uncovers family secrets in a small town.
Why do critics hate it? Bilge Ebiri of Vulture calls it a “multicharacter wallow in uncontrolled emotions,” going on to specify that “it’s how this specific movie presents all the wallowing that made me feel like I was hallucinating.” His review is actually one of the most positive, well above the average score.
Is it as bad as they say? Regetting You is undoubtedly very bad. It’s one of those adaptations that feels like it was poorly translated from another culture, but the book is in English and takes place in America. It also features scenes where Allison Williams and Dave Franco play their characters 20 years earlier — these actors look youthful, but not that youthful. But it is loopy and dumb enough to work as a dazed form of entertainment. Honestly, the laborious, overwritten, would-be cleverness of the far better-regarded romance Eternity is vastly more irritating, because it has smart-set aspirations that it fails at every turn.
9 Modi - Three Days on the Wings of Madness
Image: Be Water
Metascore: 32
What is it? Johnny Depp returns to the director’s chair decades after his barely-released film The Brave, for a few-days-in-the-life biopic of early 20th century Italian artist Amedeo Modigliani.
Why do critics hate it? Over in the U.K. Times, Kevin Maher reports that “every single scene here is about what the scene is about, creating the deepest vat of cinematic shit imaginable,” and notes the script is “shamefully inept.”
Is it as bad as they say? I must admit I could not finish this. But would you believe that a film by Johnny Depp begins with the immediate glorification of an eccentrically louche and wine-swilling artiste as a sympathetic hero? Maher’s singling out of the script really sells short what a terribly sloppy hand Depp shows behind the camera almost immediately. It’s not surprising that he hasn’t been allowed to direct a feature in nearly 30 years.
8 Smurfs
Image: Paramount
Metascore: 31
What is it? It’s Smurfs.
Why do critics hate it? Polygon’s own Oli Welsh describes it as a “randomized free-association of stuff that happens in kids’ animated movies.” Similarly, one particularly handsome writer for the late, lamented movies section of Paste Magazine calls it an “unholy mess.”
Is it as bad as they say? It’s probably the worst big-studio kid cartoon of 2025. At the same time, the studios typically make some action junk for adults that’s far more regressive and infantile than their actual children’s films, and this year is no exception. Smurfs may feel like it went through an entire development and production process without ever deciding for sure whether or not it was a musical (despite starring Rihanna!), but it feels more like a finished movie than Amazon’s appalling Playdate.
7 Juliet & Romeo
Image: Briarcliff Entertainment
Metascore: 31
What is it? An original pop musical that reimagines William Shakespeare’s timeless play — not to be confused with & Juliet, a Broadway pop musical that reimagines William Shakespeare’s timeless play.
Why do critics hate it? Courtney Howard, at Variety, calls it “amateurish” and notes that the poorly directed musical numbers are cut to shreds.
Is it as bad as they say? Say this for Juliet & Romeo: It has far more vivid and saturated colors than the inexplicably washed-out musical Wicked: For Good. The images that the filmmakers are coloring, however, still manage to look cheap and Howard’s distinction of “amateurish” is spot-on. Despite a few famous faces (including Rebel Wilson, Jacob Isaacs, and Derek Jacobi), this doesn’t feel like a proper theatrical release. The songs themselves are particularly bad, a series of limp modern-pop emo power ballads that inspire a lot of walk-singing choreography. Most notable, though, is the movie’s gall in rewriting Shakespeare on both a dialogue and story level; that’s really what takes Juliet & Romeo from forgettably bad to genuinely distasteful.
6 The Electric State
Image: Netflix
Metascore: 30
What is it? One of the most expensive Netflix original movies ever, this sci-fi adventure takes place in a dystopia where sentient robots have been banished following an attempted uprising.
Why do critics hate it? David Rooney of The Hollywood Reporter accuses the movie’s visual effects of lacking any magic whatsoever, and calls its anti-tech, quasi-humanist messaging particularly hackneyed coming from Netflix.
Is it as bad as they say? Unfortunately, the negative hype isn’t just course-correction for the film’s massive budget. I gave this movie so much of a chance that I saw it during its brief pre-Netflix theatrical run, and struggled to stay awake. Joe and Anthony Russo have been on a stunning post-Marvel flop run, proving themselves the masters of screwing up gritty drama (Cherry), slick espionage thrillers (The Gray Man), and now self-consciously retro ‘80s sci-fi with (shudder) “heart.” Anticipating their next run of Marvel movies gets harder every day.
5 Hurry Up Tomorrow
Image: Lionsgate
Metascore: 29
What is it? Essentially a feature-length version of one of those music videos bookended by lengthy and terrible non-music sections, this movie is written and produced by The Weeknd (who also stars!), with bafflingly agreeable assistance from the always-delightful Jenna Ortega.
Why do critics hate it? I’ll have everyone know that my personal review of this movie only amounts to its second-lowest score on Metacritic. Clint Worthington, writing for RogerEbert.com, outguns me with a half-star review describing it as “vapid, meandering, and insistent on its own profundity.”
Is it as bad as they say? Pretty much. Its greatest attempt at a saving grace is twofold: It is shot on celluloid and that celluloid is used to photograph Jenna Ortega, who is naturally charismatic. This novelty ends far sooner than the movie itself, despite the fact that vanishingly little of note happens in it. Its all-consuming vanity, even when depicting The Weeknd as a creep, is kind of impressive.
4 The Strangers: Chapter 2
Image: Lionsgate
Metascore: 28
What is it? The second part of a trilogy that reboots and expands upon the 2008 horror classic The Strangers, about anonymous masked killers terrorizing a couple.
Why do critics hate it? Brian Tallerico, editor of the Ebert site, says the movie’s middle-chapter status gives it an “airless, hollow quality that’s numbing.”
Is it as bad as they say? Absolutely not! (Full disclosure: I have awarded this movie its highest score on Metacritic.) The first chapter of this Strangers reboot is more or less as described: a competent but pointless (and less scary) rerun of the 2008 movie. The sequel, however, riffs on 1981’s Halloween II with what is essentially a feature-length chase scene that begins in a hospital before spilling out into a nearby forest. Director Renny Harlin shows a stronger command of dreamlike mood, using some long takes and eerie color schemes to bring us into the action. At one point, Madelaine Petsch from Riverdale is attacked by a large, feral hog. Eventually, the movie does succumb to middle-chapter lack of resolution. But the first two-thirds or so are a stripped-down delight. At least fans will know going in that this thing isn’t finished; consider that The Old Guard 2 had no particular reason to leave off mid-movie (a third one has yet to be greenlit). That seems more egregious to me.
3 Five Nights at Freddy’s 2
Image: Universal Pictures
Metacritic: 26
What is it? The sequel to the smash-hit game adaptation where possessed animatronic creatures go on some light killing sprees.
Why do critics hate it? Most likely because its very existence feels vaguely like an insult to everything we love, like, or even tolerate about the movies. While Polygon is kinder than some, merely calling it bad, A.V. Club film editor Jacob Oller drops the publication’s rare “F” on this one, nailing its fans-only, bare-bones incompetence as akin to “watching a table read of a Fandom wiki, cut off mid-article.”
Is it as bad as they say? It’s a special kind of terrible that happens when a video game designer (in this case, Scott Cawthon) is allowed what seems like full creative control over a medium he doesn’t seem to like or understand at all. These movies are the inert abominations many people expected from the big-screen Minecraft.
2 Bride Hard
Image: Magenta Light Studios
Metascore: 23
What is it? The title implies that it’s Die Hard at a wedding, and it sort of is – a wedding party gets taken hostage, and a rogue bridesmaid sneaks around to save everyone – while ignoring the regular-guy aspect of that movie and making said bridesmaid a badass secret agent. It is also the second Rebel Wilson movie on this list.
Why do critics hate it? Alison Foreman of IndieWire assesses it to contain “zero functional jokes,” which is quite low for a comedy.
Is it as bad as they say? Yes. The fact that this espionage-meets-comedy clunker got a wide theatrical release last June, however briefly, genuinely feels like a clerical error. It’s grim indeed when a theatrical release compares unfavorably to Netflix detritus like Back in Action.
1 War of the Worlds
Image: Prime Video
Metacritic: 6 (no, not out of 10... out of 100)
What is it? A pandemic-era “screen life” reimagining of War of the Worlds, where the action unfolds on computer monitors, a la Unfriended or Searching.
Why do critics hate it? Take it away, Polygon’s Matt Patches: “As the destruction ramps up, and tripods run amok across the globe, we’re mostly stuck with Ice Cube gawking and screaming into his computer like he’s an audience member of a much better movie.” At least the movie sticks to its stay-home ethos: “In the end, the surveillance state is the hero. Using the power of Big Tech, Will and Sandra devise a plan that relies entirely on… Amazon… to deliver a flash drive… in the nick of time.”
Is it as bad as they say? Emphatically, yes. Despite the involvement of screen-life guru Timur Bekmambetov, this digital War of the Worlds doesn’t seem to understand its own gimmick, frequently cutting to Ice Cube (playing a Homeland Security analyst working a “graveyard shift” unfolding during broad daylight) for shots that are positioned like a Zoom call, but aren’t actually depicting one. (Other screen-life thrillers keep strictly to the confines of, you know, a computer screen.) The movie features all the janky aesthetics of online chatting without any of the cleverness, suspense, or believable performances; Cube and Eva Longoria have never been worse. Eventually, the movie becomes a weird apologia for the surveillance state and the resilience of Amazon, who wound up distributing this orphaned movie on their Prime Video channel. Truly, its awfulness must be seen to be believed. But also, do not see this.