Not every year can be a cinematic masterpiece, and 2024 was no exception. For every Wicked or Flow that left us in awe, there were the head-scratchers, the groan-inducers, and the straight-up disasters that made us wonder: “Who greenlit this?” These films didn’t just miss the mark, they aimed at an entirely different target and still managed to trip over themselves.
From bloated sequels no one needed to pretentious experiments that forgot the audience entirely, the worst films of 2024 gave us plenty to laugh, cringe, and rant about. For an in-depth breakdown of these cinematic misfires, turning to our review page linked to our Best Movie Critic Site can help you explore detailed reviews and expert insights. If nothing else, they reminded us that even Hollywood’s biggest names and budgets can churn out a flop. So grab your popcorn (for throwing, not eating), and let’s dive into the cinematic train wrecks that made headlines for all the wrong reasons.
Jamie Broadnax’s Worst of 2024
Joker: Folie à Deux
Oh, where do we even begin? The sequel nobody really asked for but everyone was curious about somehow managed to double down on the wrong kind of madness. Joker: Folie à Deux was marketed as a gritty psychological musical, but it ended up feeling like a chaotic karaoke night at Arkham Asylum, with an atrocious ending that made absolutely no sense. And while I appreciated Lady Gaga giving it her all vocally as Harley Quinn, who in their right mind thought it was a good idea to have Joaquin Phoenix sing? That got some major side-eye from me. This made most of the musical numbers unintentionally hilarious and the plot just fell flat. It’s sad that this is the sequel to a film that broke box office records and earned Joaquin Phoenix an Oscar for Best Actor. Joker: Folie à Deux is proof that sometimes less is more, and not every masterpiece needs a sequel. Or, in this case, a musical sequel.
Megalopolis
I did a Tik Tok review on this film and was high-key upset that I left a really nice reception at TIFF to attend a screening to watch this film. Megalopolis is a film that has no identity. It doesn’t know what it wants to be and it has some of the worst performances I’ve seen by the most-talented actors this year. I found myself to be utterly bored and in my screening there were actual walk-outs. There’s no denying Francis Ford Coppola’s passion and vision, but Megalopolis proved that sometimes, even the greatest filmmakers need a co-pilot to reign them in. Instead of the masterpiece we were promised (remember this project was in development for decades), we got a sprawling, self-indulgent experiment that reminded us that ambition is no substitute for cohesion.
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice
If you were to ask me what are my favorite top 10 movies of all time, the 1988 Tim Burton film Beetlejuice would rank on my list. And yet someone thought it was a good idea 30 years later to give us a sequel that we didn’t ask for. Now, critically this film has done well with both film critics and general audiences. It also performed well at the box office, unlike Joker: Folie à Deux. However, for me I thought this film was a dud. The plot was an incoherent mess, the jokes felt forced, and the surreal whimsy that made the original so special was nowhere to be found. I really hope the franchise ends here and they don’t make another one, because the charisma of the original is still stuck in 1988 and never left. While I thought it was great that they brought back Michael Keaton, Wynona Ryder and Catherine O’Hara, even their talent couldn’t save this film for me. I did like Jenna Ortega and thought she added a new refreshing emo vibe to the role, but overall it just didn’t land for me.
Chalice Williams’ Worst of 2024
Joker 2: Folie A Deux
I’m going to be honest: the only reason this film is on my list is because it wasn’t done properly. Was it as bad as people make it seem? Absolutely not. The acting wasn’t bad at all and the cinematography was quite great. They lose the audience with the random breakouts into song and plot points that didn’t make sense (why on earth would we want to think of Joker having a baby?). One thing the film did well was it picked directly up after the first installment and actually showed a villain carrying out their sentence, proving bad guys don’t get away with everything. Besides that, Joker 2 was a hot mess full of scattered scenes that didn’t contribute to one another and we won’t even get into that unnecessary bathroom scene. I had high hopes, as Lady Gaga and Joaquin Phoenix are extremely talented. It’s a mystery what went wrong, but it was truly sad to see an Oscar-winning film receive such a lackluster sequel.
The Crow (2024)
Some cult classics really shouldn’t be touched, and The Crow was one of them. But they went there and it was an utter disappointment, especially to the fans of the original. With the tragic incident that cost the life of Brandon Lee on the set of the original, you would think that if you are even going to attempt to recreate this iconic film, you’d take your time to make it perfect. That was not the case, although Bill Skarsgård’s transformation was fantastic and he was indeed a great fit for the role. The story itself needed work and the lack of press to promote the film caused there to be little knowledge that it was even released. It instantly became one of those films you wanted to see just to check out how awful it was.
Madame Web
There is simply no interest in seeing anything Sony tries to do when it comes to Marvel, although I enjoyed the Venom trilogy. Madame Web had social media in a frenzy when it was first announced that a film was in production. But when I saw Dakota Johnson and Sydney Sweeney attached, I lost interested as I didn’t think they had what it takes to carry a film that was already projected to perform poorly. With so many lines delivery so cringe and a plot that doesn’t have a valuable climax, it was a pointless film to even attempt, and if it was going to have any real chance at being decent, Marvel Studios would have had to get involved. Sony just isn’t that girl when it comes to comic book films. This film was so poorly received, it reminded me of how we all hated Gigli back in the day.
Jeanine T Abraham’s Worst of 2024
Emilia Pérez
Written and directed by Jacques Audiard, Emilia Pérez is a horrible musical with gratuitous violence, a sophomoric storyline, and an uninspired ending that leaves you thinking, why did I just sit through this nonsense? Rita (Zoe Saldana) is an attorney for a drug cartel. Juan Manitas Del Monte, a drug cartel kingpin, contacts Rita to help him fake their death and assist him to transition into living as a woman named Emilia Pérez (Karla Sofia Gascón) and retire. Jacques Audiard’s script is scattered, nonsensical, and regressive. I don’t understand why this was a musical. People just started singing out of nowhere; the music wasn’t great, the movie felt long, the choreography was lackluster, and the script was so full of stereotypes that it was laughable. Juan Manitas and Emilia Pérez are one-dimensional bullies manipulating people to serve their self-interest. Juan Manitas abandons his wife Jessi (Selena Gomez) and sons, transitions into and then controls their lives from afar. Emilia is a hypocrite, and the film just assumes because they have placed a trans woman in this role that the audience will be sympathetic. Emilia is a superficial character, and the film follows more tired old tropes around trans people than I can count. There’s even a scene where Rita gasps in disgust as Juan Manitas shows their breasts to prove they are serious about having surgery to transition. Emilia Pérez feels like a trans version of Green Book, Oscar bait, cosplaying at being aware of social issues while being tone-deaf.
Kinds of Kindness
This film was yet another excuse for director Yorgos Lanthimos to have female actors take their clothes off and perform graphic, gratuitous sex scenes and show far-fetched situations in the most graphic and gross ways. Yorgos Lanthimos’ work is like that of a film student whose only talent lies in writing the most obscene nonsense he can think of and convincing naive young actors to do the most demeaning things on screen and call it art. Kinds of Kindness consists of three short films. The first involves a man who receives a daily handwritten letter with detailed instructions that control every aspect of the man’s life, from what he eats to when he has sex with his wife. As a reward, he receives rare sports memorabilia. But when he’s instructed to inflict a violent act on a stranger, he questions authority, and the result leaves him in a pickle. Another is about a husband convincing his wife to cut small parts of her body off to cook for him to eat. Another involves a manipulative sex cult. All three short films occur in worlds I don’t want to visit. Kinds of Kindness is almost three hours long, and each minute feels like four. Each film finds a different way to exploit and demean women. The costumes, set design, and make-up for each film look shabby. The attempts at dark humor aren’t funny. This kind of misogynistic filmmaking is not for me.
Nightbitch
Writer/director Marielle Heller has created a concept of a movie about motherhood through the experience of a privileged married white woman. Mother (Amy Adams) is the stay-at-home parent to her son and is cared for by her Husband (Scoot McNairy). The husband makes a good living, and the family lives in a beautiful house in an upper-class suburb. Mother pours the entirety of her heart, soul, and creativity into raising her son but is bored and invisible to the friends she had when she was an artist before motherhood. Mother looks down on the other mothers in her community, and she is so focused on catering to her only son’s every need that she doesn’t take care of herself. She’s sleep-deprived and feels underappreciated, and she finds community with a pack of dogs in her neighborhood and starts running with the dogs at night, or is she? Mother gets to the point where she believes she’s turning into a dog and finds liberation through acting like an animal.
Nightbitch was eye-opening because it gave insight into how some white mothers groom their sons to believe that the world is their oyster. Mother abandons her identity as an artist to pour everything into this child without providing any kind of discipline. Nightbitch expects the audience to sympathize with mothers who coddle their children’s every whim without structure or discipline. The film questions the patriarchy, but Mother is raising her son to be a part of that system. Mother chose to have the child. If she wanted to return to work so badly, she could hire a nanny or babysitter and go back to work! The child is already about two. If she wants to stay home, he will be in pre-school for just a few years. Go back to work when he’s in school! These kinds of mothers create the men who end up being boyfriends or husbands who expect women to care for their every need without question. Nightbitch got on my last nerve.
The Deliverance
Lee Daniels directs this tedious supernatural thriller about Ebony (Andra Day), an alcoholic single mother who unknowingly moves her three children and her mother Alberta (Glenn Close) into a haunted house and tries to convince the pious social worker (Mo’Nique) that she can take care of her children even though they show up to school covered in bruises, and act out in peculiar and disgusting ways during class. The Deliverance is an atrocious knockoff of The Exorcist, The Ring, and several other innovative horror films made in the past fifty years. Ebony is the same old tired, low-income, self-medicating Black mother trope. Ebony yells at her kids, is angry at the world, and makes all the wrong choices all the time. The writing is mediocre and does nothing to create relatable people to care about.
Everyone in this film is a stereotype. Glenn Close seems to have a good time cosplaying her inner Rachel Dolezal as this white woman with a fetish for Black men who has attached herself to this particular working-class Black community through her mixed daughter and Black grandchildren. The best part about Alberta was the hilarious memes people created of her on social media. Mo’Nique and Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor’s characters are underwritten. From the interviews for this film, it seems like the actors had a good time, but for the audience, you can see the jump scares coming from a mile away; the jokes aren’t funny, the entire story is predictable, and the film’s resolution is simply condescending. Good horror films have characters you care about placed in suspenseful situations that scare the audience and compel folks to root for the people on screen to survive. The Deliverance was so awful I started rooting for the demons.
Cassondra Feltus’ Worst of 2024
Apartment 7A
Going into Apartment 7A, I knew it wouldn’t be particularly suspenseful. As a prequel to Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby, writer-director Natalie Erika James (Relic) had an uphill battle. Anyone familiar with the iconic 1968 film already knows what’s going to happen to Terry Gionoffrio, played here by Julia Garner, which takes away most of the mystery. What leads to her untimely death is interesting enough; James and co-writer Christian White (Clickbait) gave Terry a more fleshed-out backstory as a struggling Broadway dancer. It puts her in the position to accept an offer of a free apartment from a couple of invasive, love-bombing strangers. However, I’m more curious about the Satanic origins of Minnie (Dianne Wiest) and Roman Castevet (Kevin McNally). Although it was a beautifully shot film with impressive performances, Apartment 7A just didn’t deliver a compelling story.
Salem’s Lot
Gary Dauberman’s (It, It Chapter Two) take on Salem’s Lot was intended for the big screen but ended up a Max Original. Despite the many hoops it had to jump through just to get released, the film feels a bit rushed. While some scenes, including the silhouetted abduction of young Ralphie Glick (Cade Woodward), were effectively chilling, there are few actual scares. Horror fanatic Mark Petrie (Jordan Preston Carter), Dr. Cody (Alfre Woodard), and others have very little characterization, and the (mostly trauma-bonded) relationships fail to feel even slightly believable. I’ve seen most of these actors turn in stellar performances in other projects, so everyone’s stilted dialogue delivery was surprising.
The Deliverance
Writer-director Lee Daniels (The United States vs. Billie Holiday) tried his hand at horror with The Deliverance. Inspired by the true story of the Ammons family, this family drama centers on a single mother raising three children who unknowingly moves them into a haunted house. Ebony Jackson (Andra Day) is one of the most unlikable characters I’ve seen. Daniels wrote her as another Angry Black Woman stereotype, someone struggling with maintaining their sobriety, who constantly berates her kids for anything and everything. She’s always fighting with her ill mother Alberta (Glenn Close), a white lady who’s fully adopted Black culture as her own. Glenn Close seems to be having fun with the role, mostly the wild, unflattering wardrobe. She’s also given some truly baffling lines. What began as a social supernatural thriller about poverty, generational trauma, and addiction ended as an evangelical version of The Amityville Horror (or, at least, an attempt at) that came off as rather preachy.
Catalina Combs’ Worst of 2024
Trap
The only thing good about Trap was seeing Josh Hartnett. He is forever, one of my ultimate 90s crushes. But, he alone could not save this film. Directed by M. Night Shyamalan, I was expecting some twist or reveal towards the end, as he is known for. I was let down. The reveal came too early! Not to mention, the trailers revealed too much of what we were to expect leading up to the release. The plot was non existent and the delivery was lacking. The suspense was built, but released too soon. The film seemed rushed. The ending was uninspired. There’s no way a Taylor Swift/Billie Eillish-type artist should ever have made it as far as she did with a legit serial killer. Casting was great, but I need a redo from Shyamalan.
And there you have it, the cinematic misfires, blunders, and “what-were-they-thinking” moments that graced (or disgraced) our screens this year. These films might not have hit the mark, but they sure gave us something to talk about. Whether it was misguided sequels, bloated passion projects, or cringe-worthy reboots, 2024 proved that even in failure, Hollywood finds a way to entertain us—just not always how they intended.
Let’s hope 2025 brings more hits than misses, but hey, if it doesn’t, we’ll still be here, ready to unpack the next cinematic train wreck.