With 2024 winding down, and the fun job of counting down the best movies of the year already completed, it’s time to get to the less-fun part: Ranking the worst films of the year.
Obviously a crummy movie can come from any genre; my list contains action films, superhero adaptations, dark thrillers, dopey Christmas comedies, animated features, and even a film about a confused young woman battling an evildoer who was in the Amazon with her mom when she was researching spiders just before she died. They truly run the gamut.
Still, examining my picks now that my list is complete, I do see a recurring theme: Movies (often highly budgeted ones!) that look like absolute junk. Film is a visual medium. One of the fundamental pleasures of going to the movies is looking at beautiful and or interesting things. And yet so many of the big escapist pictures of the last year just looked … awful. Crummy digital photography, phony special effects, unconvincing green-screen backgrounds, and on and on.
Hopefully 2025 will bring better-looking movies, if not more entertaining ones. That doesn’t seem like too much to ask. In the meantime, here’s my list of the 12 worst movies of 2024 — with the admitted asterisk that in this era of streaming, it is literally impossible, not to mention inhumanly painful, to watch all the contenders for this prize. For more of the worst movies of the year, make sure you check out Emma Stefansky’s list on the worst Netflix movies of 2024. (Before you accuse us of being haters, we’ve got a list of the best Netflix movies of 2024 too.)
The Worst Movies of 2024
ScreenCrush’s editor and critic picks the 12 worst films he saw in 2024.
READ MORE: The Best Movies of 2024
The Worst Netflix Movies of 2024
Netflix released a lot of movies this year. Some were great! These were not.
Gallery Credit: Emma Stefansky