2025 has produced some truly stellar films across genres and styles, including acclaimed hits like Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, and Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet. There have been movies we knew would be good that turned out to be even better, and movies we didn’t expect to be great but still proved us wrong in the best ways. Then there are the movies on this list.
Let’s face it, there are always going to be bad movies, even when you have star-studded casts and veteran filmmakers involved, but we’re here to talk about the movies that are so terrible they’re (almost) brilliant in their badness. Sometimes this is intentional, especially with the horror comedy genre, which regularly revels in camp. Most of them, however, are simply terrible movies that should never have made it to screens, but now that they’re here, we may as well laugh about them. Read on to discover our handpicked selection of the worst 2025 movies that are so bad they’re good.
10
‘Death of a Unicorn’ (2025)
Written and directed by Alex Scharfman in his directorial debut, Death of a Unicorn seems like it almost wants to be on this list. An exceptionally campy dark fantasy horror comedy, the movie stars Paul Rudd and Jenna Ortega as a father and daughter who accidentally kill a unicorn while driving to a weekend retreat at a pharma billionaire’s house. Turns out unicorns have miraculous healing powers, making them a pharmaceutical holy grail, but they’re also very, very homicidal, and chaos ensues. Will Poulter, Téa Leoni, and Richard E. Grant star in supporting roles.
Death of a Unicorn is, as we mentioned, a campy film, and some parts of its story veer into sheer absurdity. The movie had its world premiere at the 2025 South by Southwest Festival and was released theatrically by A24, garnering very mixed reviews from critics and a middling box office gross. Now, to be fair, the ensemble cast delivers excellent performances — Paul Rudd is Paul Rudd, Jenna Ortega is Jenna Ortega, and Poulter and Grant are hilarious villains. Still, though it’s certainly a fun popcorn horror film, the one thing Death of a Unicorn is not is a good movie.
9
‘Love Hurts’ (2025)
Directed by Jonathan Eusebio in his directorial debut, Love Hurts is a Valentine’s action comedy starring Ke Huy Quan as hitman-turned-realtor Marvin Gable. When he is unexpectedly contacted by his former partner (Ariana DeBose) around Valentine’s Day, Marvin finds himself targeted by assassins working for his estranged brother (Daniel Wu). Mustafa Shakir, Lio Tipton, Cam Gigandet, Marshawn Lynch, and Sean Astin star in supporting roles.
Love Hurts is basically a combination of the Bob Odenkirk action comedies Girlfriend’s Day and Nobody, with Ke Huy Quan in the lead role. The result is a film that’s neither critically nor commercially successful, but is still a fun watch because of the sheer absurdity of it all. Quan, to his credit, is extremely charming as always, and the action scenes are plenty entertaining. But with no originality in plot or characters, the film itself is little more than a campy date-night background flick.
8
‘Playdate’ (2025)
Directed by Luke Greenfield and written by Neil Goldman, Playdate is a buddy action comedy starring Kevin James and Alan Ritchson as two very different dads who find an unexpected bond. James stars as Brian, a recently laid-off forensic accountant struggling to adjust to life as a stay-at-home dad, who arranges a playdate for his stepson with the new dad in the neighborhood (Ritchson), who turns out to be a former Delta Force soldier on the run from the military. Besides James and Ritchson, the movie also stars Sarah Chalke, Alan Tudyk, Benjamin Pajak, Banks Pierce, Hiro Kanagawa, Stephen Root, and Isla Fisher.
Let’s talk about the good stuff first: Alan Ritchson is absolutely endearing in his latest action hero role. And now the bad stuff: everything else. Playdate is an absolute mess of a movie with jokes that never land and punches that do so at random, and it was largely panned by critics and genre fans. However, the film has still proven to be a popular watch with streaming audiences, hitting the number one spot on Prime Video in the week of its release and staying there for three whole weeks.
7
‘Screamboat’ (2025)
Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks‘s Steamboat Willie, the first Mickey Mouse short, entered the public domain in 2024, so obviously, it had to be given the gory horror movie treatment in the tradition of Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey. Directed by Steven LaMorte of The Mean One fame, Screamboat is a horror comedy reimagining of the short featuring Terrifier and Mean One star David Howard Thornton as a monstrous Steamboat Willie, who terrorizes a group of New Yorkers aboard an old Staten Island Ferry, including pastiches of some of Disney’s most iconic princesses. Allison Pittel, Amy Schumacher, Jesse Posey, Kailey Hyman, Jesse Kove, and Jarlath Conroy star in supporting roles.
It’s unlikely that anybody expected Screamboat to be a critical darling, and it did get predictably mixed reviews, but the film makes its inherent ridiculousness work in its favor by leaning fully into the bad. A gory slasher reminiscent of Thornton’s Terrifier films, the movie delights in endless evisceration strung together with a bare-bones plot full of random Disney references. The movie grossed less than $400,000, but a sequel is already in development, titled Screamboat 2: Nothing Stays Dead.
6
‘Wolf Man’ (2025)
A reboot of Universal’s eponymous franchise, Wolf Man is a supernatural horror film directed and co-written by Leigh Whannell. The movie stars Christopher Abbott as Blake Lovell, a writer and family man who starts turning into a werewolf while vacationing at his childhood home, becoming a danger to his wife, Charlotte (Julia Garner), and daughter, Ginger (Matilda Firth). Sam Jaeger, Milo Cawthorne, and Benedict Hardie star in supporting roles.
Universal has been trying to find new ways to revive its classic monster movie franchises for a while now, and Wolf Man started life as a potential installment in their failed Dark Universe project. After a lot of back and forth behind the scenes, the film finally made it to screens in January 2025, and the reception has been mixed, to say the least. The movie attempts to take an elevated, psychological horror angle to the werewolf genre and falls quite a bit short of the mark, but it’s still got some compelling performances and solid body horror. It isn’t likely to start a new franchise, but the film is entertaining for monster movie fans and has earned the praise of horror icon Stephen King.
5
‘Snow White’ (2025)
Walt Disney’s 1938 film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is one of the most iconic, timeless animated films of all time, so obviously, Disney decided it needed a live-action remake. Directed by Marc Webb, Snow White is a musical fantasy movie that stars Rachel Zegler as the title character, who escapes an assassination attempt by her stepmother, the Evil Queen (Gal Gadot), and teams up with seven “magical beings” to take her rightful throne. Andrew Burnap, Jeremy Swift, Andrew Barth Feldman, Tituss Burgess, Martin Klebba, George Salazar, and more appear in supporting roles.
The live-action Snow White was controversial practically from the moment it was announced because of the color-blind casting, the reimagining of the Seven Dwarfs, and Zegler and Gadot’s opposing views on the genocide. But if you were to disregard all that controversy and look at the movie on its own merits, you’ll see that it’s still a terrible film that nobody needed, asked for, or deserved to be subjected to. From the poor CGI and charmless narrative to the unnecessary changes in characterization, the film is riddled with issues and ultimately butchers its original story in favor of an ill-conceived narrative that’s messy, tropey, and, in its worst moments, flat-out boring. But hey, it would still probably be fun to watch with your friends a la Cats!
4
‘Kinda Pregnant’ (2025)
Amy Schumer co-wrote and stars in Kinda Pregnant, a comedy film directed by Tyler Spindel. The movie follows Lainy (Schumer), a 40-something school teacher who is so envious of women she knows getting pregnant that she steals a fake pregnancy belly and pretends to be pregnant. The movie also stars Jillian Bell, Brianne Howey, and Will Forte in supporting roles.
With a premise that sounds like a bad SNL sketch, Kinda Pregnant’s only real hope was to come across as an earnest film about how society pressures women to get pregnant. Unfortunately, this isn’t that movie. The film was widely panned by critics, but it got pretty high viewership on Netflix when it was released in February 2025, so clearly, some people thought it was worth watching. Ultimately, it’s a terrible movie in which Amy Schumer does some outrageous things that occasionally turn out to be funny, but even its best moments can’t justify the fundamental stupidity (and creepiness) of its premise.
3
‘G20’ (2025)
Directed by Patricia Riggen, G20 is an action thriller that revolves around a terrorist attack on a G20 conference venue. Luckily for the gathered dignitaries, US President Danielle Sutton (Viola Davis) is on site and ready to use her extensive military skills to save the day. And there’s a whole cryptocurrency conspiracy going on at the same time, which is vaguely important. The movie also stars Anthony Anderson, Marsai Martin, Ramón Rodríguez, Douglas Hodge, Elizabeth Marvel, Sabrina Impacciatore, Clark Gregg, and Antony Starr in key roles.
On a meta level, G20 was clearly meant for a timeline in which the 2024 Presidential Election went in a different direction, but even in such a parallel world, this would still be a terrible movie. Though Viola Davis is as badass as ever as the gun-toting Commander-in-Chief, the film isn’t hard-hitting enough to be an elevated political thriller and too self-serious to be a comedy. The result is a campy, wannabe Air Force One with none of the thrills.
2
‘Shadow Force’ (2025)
Directed and co-written by Joe Carnahan, Shadow Force is an action thriller starring Kerry Washington and Omar Sy as former black ops agents Kyrah and Isaac, who fall in love and go underground in the hopes of raising a family in peace. Targeted by their former boss (Mark Strong), Kyrah and Isaac must use their skills to stay one step ahead of their former colleagues and protect their son. The movie also features Da’Vine Joy Randolph, Jahleel Kamara, Cliff “Method Man” Smith, and more in supporting roles.
With a name like Shadow Force, most audiences could be forgiven for thinking it’s a silly B-movie, but the truth is so much worse. Almost hilariously bad in its narrative, Shadow Force was a major bomb at the box office and received generally negative reviews, facing criticism for its predictable story and by-the-numbers script. It’s a movie with a lot of ambition, and nothing to back it up. Not even the fairly compelling performances by Washington and Sy can save this disaster. But at least it’s still more interesting than the next movie:
1
‘War of the Worlds’ (2025)
Directed by Rich Lee, War of the Worlds is a screenlife adaptation of the classic H. G. Wells novel The War of the Worlds. Ice Cube stars as Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officer Will Radford, who works for a surveillance program that can monitor every person on Earth. When aliens invade the Earth looking to feed on our data, Will must work with his estranged children (Iman Benson and Henry Hunter Hall) to save the day. The movie also stars Eva Longoria, Clark Gregg, Andrea Savage, Devon Bostick, and Michael O’Neill in supporting roles.
Everything above is what the movie is supposed to be, but in reality, War of the Worlds is basically one big Amazon commercial disguised as a crappy sci-fi movie. With an unrealistic plot (the aliens eat data), barely-there performances, and a narrative that completely misses the point of its source material, the movie is by far the worst adaptation of Wells’ iconic sci-fi classic we’ve ever seen, and it has widely been described as one of the worst movies of the year. Seriously, you have to laugh at this movie, because the only other option is asking Amazon for a refund.
- Release Date
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July 30, 2025
- Runtime
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91 Minutes
- Director
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Rich Lee
- Writers
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Marc Hyman, Kenny Golde, H.G. Wells
- Producers
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Timur Bekmambetov
