Curiosity Inc.

As a long-standing rule, I do my best not to see a film if I know there’s no chance it will be good. There’s a reason why I chose not to dignify Regretting You, Smurfs, War of the Worlds (2025), Bride Hard, Juliet & Romeo (Wow, here’s hoping Rebel Wilson’s career is finally done.), Hurry Up Tomorrow, The Strangers: Chapter 2, or The Electric State with my time and money.

That’s not to say I never see bad movies — indeed, I’d argue that it’s good and healthy to watch a stinker every now and then. But if I’m watching and reviewing any movie for this blog, it’s because I had some reason to believe that it had potential. Maybe the filmmakers had talent. Maybe the film was given huge investment from the studio responsible. Maybe it succeeded massively well with critics and/or audiences.

Sometimes, films are benign disappointments that I personally didn’t care for, but plenty of others do for legitimate reasons. Sometimes, films are stupid disappointments, made by filmmakers who put all their best efforts and sincerest intentions into a project that simply fell apart. And every once in a rare while, we get a malicious disappointment crafted with transparent loathing for the audience.

These are not the worst films of the year. These are the Disappointments of 2025.

Most Benign Disappointment

My least favorite category every year, so let’s get right into it.

F1 was instantly forgettable fun as only Jerry Bruckheimer could produce. I get how The Life of Chuck could be seen as charming, but I personally can’t abide how the film outright slaughters coherent storytelling as a sacrifice to the god of metaphors. Eternity was a sweet little movie right up until it collapsed at the end, and Hamnet had the opposite problem.

I personally thought Bugonia was a prank on the audience, but I’ve seen a few surprisingly good arguments to the contrary. Likewise, I’m open to the possibility that I simply didn’t get The Testament of Ann Lee. Friendship was made for fans of Tim Robinson and nobody else.

But if I had to describe the concept of a “benign disappointment”, I think I’d point to The Friend. There’s nothing objectively wrong with the film — indeed, I’m perfectly willing to believe that somebody would have a lovely time watching it. But on the whole, considering the talent and premise involved, I found it to be far too bland and forgettable.

Worst Franchise-Killer

I know Jurassic Park: Rebirth made enough money to keep the franchise going, but it firmly proved that the franchise should’ve ended with the first movie and there’s no point in keeping it going any longer. Likewise, Tron: Ares and Ballerina have both thoroughly proven that their respective franchises have no business continuing, certainly not under their current handlers.

The clear and obvious choice here is I Know What You Did Last Summer (2025), a remakequel that committed the ultimate unforgivable sin of directly insulting the fanbase and retroactively tainting the previous films. This is an abomination that absolutely has to kill the franchise stone-cold dead. On the other hand, I could at least understand why that film might’ve been a good idea on paper. The filmmakers might’ve actively insulted the audience, but at least they knew who the audience was.

By contrast, who on this godforsaken planet was asking for The Accountant 2?! How the blue blazing hell did a middling success from 2016 get a sequel with twice the budget a decade later? Who thought that another go-round with Christian Wolff was the best use of Ben Affleck’s time and talent? Where are the mental health advocates who thought this franchise was a sterling depiction of autism? How the high holy fuck did a film so aggressively racist, morally bankrupt, and pitifully uninspired get made with an $80 million budget and an April tentpole release in goddamn 2025?!

This movie made The Accountant — of all movies! — into an honest-to-God franchise, just to instantly kill that franchise stone-cold dead on the spot. Those responsible can and should go fuck themselves.

Franchise FTL

If only A Minecraft Movie hadn’t made more money than it deserved. Though frankly, I’m more disappointed in Dog Man — making the villain the protagonist was a screamingly bone-headed move. As for Heart Eyes, a film with that premise and pedigree had no business being so dull.

But the clear winner here is Until Dawn, a strong contender for the most humiliating horror movie of the year. Box office bomb, duller than dogshit, too uninspired and predictable to be any kind of scary. I need hardly add that the video game was already made and marketed as an interactive movie that could play out in hundreds of possible ways depending on player choice, so trying to adapt this was a terrible choice in the first place.

The “Epic Fail”

Again, A Minecraft Movie gets dishonorable mention here for being so terrible, but it did at least succeed in delivering a huge sprawling world. Even if it was exclusively populated with one-dimensional nincompoops. I could also point to The Life of Chuck, a film that told a massive story on a universal scale, held up by towers of bullshit.

Then we have Rust and O’Dessa, two coming-of-age films that followed a young protagonist through vast inhospitable wastelands. Both films were big on spectacle, yet hopelessly misguided and crafted by filmmakers too far out of their depth.

To represent all of the above, I choose A Big Bold Beautiful Journey. Here we have a fantastically beautiful movie that unfolds all through time and space, desperately struggling to make any kind of coherent statement about life and the human condition. The filmmakers tried so damn hard to make a whimsical modern fairy tale without the slightest fucking clue how to do it. The tone is inconsistent, the world-building is pigshit, and the script is all over the place. What a waste.

Unfunniest Comedy

Love Hurts was a humiliating failure for Team John Wick, an action romcom that was neither romantic nor comical. At least Oh, Hi! was funny in places, but it suffered terribly for trying to stretch a short film’s worth of premise to feature length. And then of course we have One of Them Days, which took a perfectly good premise and socioeconomic themes only to waste them on shrill characters who kept making their own problems for no reason.

But instead, this is the one that goes to A Minecraft Movie. It’s outright baffling how this picture succeeded in so many ways, even as the filmmakers aggressively raced to the bottom. Totally brainless, hopelessly unfunny, and massively lucrative. Makes you want to weep.

Dumbest Attempt to Be Smart

Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, The Smashing Machine, and Marty Supreme — all overhyped awards-bait biopics that nobody will remember this time next year. At least The Running Man (2025) was interesting to watch at first, even as the film couldn’t keep up the momentum long enough to make a coherent point. It still fared better than Him, a shallow vainglorious turd with all the style and ambition of a Jordan Peele flick and only one-third the talent.

Even so, the clear winner here is Together, which took a genuinely interesting metaphor for toxic codependence and hopelessly fumbled it. A film made and marketed as a vehicle for Alison Brie and Dave Franco, only to indisputably prove how Franco needs his wife more desperately than Brie needs him. This film could’ve and should’ve been something truly sexy and gut-churning and thought-provoking, if only the filmmakers weren’t so cowardly and inept.

Dumbest Thriller

There was nothing wrong with Fight or Flight that couldn’t have been fixed by a director who knew how to make an action movie. Then again, Caught Stealing was a film made by far greater talent, and it also turned out to be a hollow and clumsy clusterfuck of so many jumbled genres and plotlines. I could also point to Honey Don’t!, a pitifully constructed mystery thriller that doesn’t deserve to be mentioned in connection with either Coen Brother. And then of course we have Wolf Man, a mediocre zombie flick masquerading as a werewolf movie.

Even compared with all those others, Night Always Comes is trash. Sleazy, boring, brain-dead, and deeply unpleasant to sit through. The plot is a mess, the characters are one-dimensional, everything about this is ugly and godawful. Bad enough that this movie made my city look ugly, but it made Vanessa Kirby look ugly in the process. Unforgivable.

Most Malicious Disappointment

If we’re going to talk about the most malicious film of 2025, made with the most outright loathing and contempt for the audience, you might expect something like I Know What You Did Last Summer (2025) or A Minecraft Movie or Tron: Ares. To be sure, those films were all aggressively and outrageously bad enough that they could only have sucked on purpose. But here’s the thing: At least those movies all had an audience to piss off. We all knew right off the bat who those movies were supposedly made for.

Who in all the nine hells was Eddington made for?!

2025 was the year when Ari Aster took whatever public goodwill he had left and washed it down the drain with his used bong water. He directed and/or produced three deeply misanthropic movies, but Eddington is the indisputable nadir. Two and a half hours of free-floating hostility, paranoid fearmongering, and incoherent rage at literally everything. And unlike Aster’s other notable works, this one doesn’t even have any trippy visuals or concepts to make it the least bit unique or interesting.

It’s gotten to the point where Aster has become the very thing he keeps railing against in his movies, contributing to the same chaos he’s supposedly so afraid of and angry at. In my review, I said that Aster was effectively “Adam McKay on shrooms”, and I stand by that. It’s been a few years since we last heard from McKay, and it’s time we chucked Aster into the dumpster right along with him.

Stay tuned for the Wild Rides list coming up!

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