The 2025 Wrap Up: Here’s The Top 5 Absolute Worst Movies of The Year

You know, 2025 was a pretty great year at the movies overall… but we’re not here to talk about the best that cinema had to offer throughout 2025. Not yet, anyway.

Rather, this article is all about the biggest filmic turds I had the displeasure of seeing this year. Perhaps it’s precisely because we’ve had so many bangers that these entries stink all the more. Some I’ll remember for years owing to their fascinatingly terrible qualities, while others I hope to never think about ever again in my life. So without further ado…

#5: Hurry Up Tomorrow

Though an utterly terrible film, I must admit that Hurry Up Tomorrow utterly fascinates me as an artistic product. What inspired The Weeknd (real name Abel Tesfaye), after the disastrous reception of 2023’s The Idol, to think it was a great idea to make a movie basically about himself?

Pairing with Waves director Trey Edward Shults and actual actors Jenna Ortega and Barry Keoghan, its ‘tell, don’t show’ narrative and honest-to-god awful performance from Tesfaye makes me think there should be some checks and balances in place to stop a pop star from writing and starring in a movie about themselves.

#4: Until Dawn

I wrote at length earlier this year about why movie and TV adaptations of games almost always suck, and Until Dawn was actually the movie that inspired that crashout disguised as an opinion piece.

This is a film that only pays lip service to the game it’s inspired by, opting to include a total nonsensical time-loop story that is, to put it simply, stupid as hell. It feels like it’s only called Until Dawn because that’s a piece of IP that’ll boost sales, rather than because there was a genuine desire to adapt the game in a meaningful way… and even if it were called something else, this would still be one of the most worst horror films of 2025.

#3: Lilo & Stitch

Perhaps the most evil movie of the year, I really do hate the live action remake of Lilo & Stitch with my very soul.

I say this mainly because the 2025 remake, which is partially shot in Disney’s Hawai’ian resort that commercialises native culture, is practically neo-colonial propaganda: this film sees Nani give her little sister over to the state so that she can go study in mainland America without so much as a second thought. It’s a misread of the original Lilo & Stitch so bad that it’s genuinely offensive to Hawai’ian culture, and even anybody who claims to like the original movie.

But that’s not all! The movie is also horrible to look at, poorly acted, and sands off all the edges of an already PG-rated movie. Drag-coded Agent Pleakley? Gone. Anything that suggests Lilo and Nani have a difficult home life? Atomised. The Ugly Duckling subplot core to the original’s themes? Not necessary! But hey, at least we have Stitch causing chaos to Uptown Funk in a resort, isn’t that so funny?!?

#2: War of the Worlds

The only movie on the list I didn’t review for this publication, War of the Worlds is an immediate classic of the so-bad-its-good genre. Filmed mostly during COVID with the stunning decision to seemingly give its actors no direction whatsoever, director Rich Lee’s take on the classic H.G. Wells’ novel is a trainwreck in the same vein as The Room.

Ice Cube stars as William Radford, a psychotic CIA operative who just so happens to hold the (USB) key to saving humanity without leaving his desk when Martians invade. It’s got some of the worst… well, everything I’ve ever seen in a film, but it’s so comically incompetent that it’s mainly just a sheer joy to watch itself constantly step on rakes.

It does dip its toes into ‘evil movie’ territory at the end when a homeless man being given a $100 Amazon gift card becomes one of the most important elements of the film, but that head-scratching and totally-not-sponsored-by-Bezos plot beat is only a small part of what makes War of the Worlds such a hilariously bad film to watch. Well worth a watch these holidays after a few glasses of something to see where all those memes come from.

#1: A Minecraft Movie

The review I wrote for A Minecraft Movie is maybe the most venomous piece of film criticism I’ve ever written, and I fully stand by it.

It’s the epitome of a “Look guys! Thing you recognise!” movie that I’ve grown to despise so thoroughly in recent years. Jack Black’s Steve constantly says the names of things out loud in the hopes it will elicit some response from the terminally brainrotted audience, in place of anything that could even be remotely interpreted as “character moments” or “plot”.

Add to that a terrible script, disturbingly uncanny visuals and a narrative that feels so AI-generated it would put ChatGPT to shame, I especially hate A Minecraft Movie for the fact that it’s an artistically bankrupt work based on a game all about expressing human creativity.

I can only hope its main cultural impact will go as far as “that one weekend where teenagers ruined cinemas across the world,” with the content of the film itself fading into utter obscurity.

In conclusion…

Not sure about you, but I feel a lot better after getting that off my chest!

Although this list focused on the worst movies of the year, we’ll be back soon a best movies of 2025 list that I guarantee will be much more positive than this; see you then!