Every year has its share of bad movies, and 2024 was no exception. Not everything can turn out to be a great movie or even a good one. But there were so many terrible films this year that we couldn’t even find a place for Megalopolis on our list of seven… and that is one epically bad movie!
Unsurprisingly, there are four comic-book inspired films on our list of the seven worst movies of 2024. And this roundup would have been incomplete without them. But these superhero-adjacent flicks aren’t the only offenders that earned their place here. There’s also an amazingly awful Christmas action film, a soulless video game movie, and an actor’s vanity project that you may need to see in order to believe that it’s real. But it’s probably a better idea to avoid that one altogether.
Interested in more of the best of 2024? Then check out you probably haven’t seen 2024’s best movies, the best horror movies of 2024, and the best sci-fi movies of 2024.
7. Joker: Folie à Deux
Few films illustrate the divide between audience expectations and the desires of the filmmakers like Joker: Folie à Deux. The first Joker was a massive hit, even though it was less of a comic-book film and more of a remake of The King of Comedy. Director Todd Phillips and star Joaquin Phoenix didn’t have any intention of doing a sequel until they fell in love with the idea of incorporating musical numbers into the story of Arthur Fleck/Joker. Lady Gaga was subsequently cast as Harleen “Lee” Quinzel because of her singing abilities, and in retrospect, that may have been when the audience tuned out.
Fans would have probably preferred a story with greater links to Batman, but this version of Joker was far from the Clown Prince of Crime we’ve seen in previous TV shows or movies. Phoenix’s Joker simply wasn’t criminal mastermind material, and his story set up the movie’s final twist, which largely infuriated the fans who did come back for the sequel. There were definitely worse movies this year than Joker: Folie à Deux, but only a few that were more disappointing.
6. Red One
Take a look at Red One and marvel in horror at the idea that someone not only thought this soulless Christmas action flick was a good idea, they also spent $250 million on it. Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson was once considered the top action star in Hollywood, but he won’t hang on to that crown if he keeps starring in turkeys like this one.
Johnson plays Callum Drift, the disillusioned head of security for Santa Claus (J.K. Simmons) at the North Pole. When Santa is kidnapped, Callum and his boss, Zoe Harlow (Lucy Liu), turn to Jack O’Malley (Chris Evans), one of the best bounty hunters in the world. The film has plenty of Christmas trappings, but no clue about what the holiday is meant to mean. If ever there was an Amazon-produced movie that felt like an Amazon Prime product, this is it. The only upside to Red One is that it was so soundly rejected in theaters that we may not be subjected to a sequel.
5. Kraven the Hunter
If you were surprised that a Kraven the Hunter film turned out to be a bad idea, then you haven’t been paying attention to Sony’s attempts to turn Spider-Man villains into movie stars without using Spider-Man. That forces the movie to try to make Kraven (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) into a sympathetic anti-hero at the cost of any qualities that would have made him interesting.
Former Best Actor Oscar-winner Russell Crowe really hams it up as Kraven’s father, Nikolai Kravinoff, but this seems like a large step down after playing Superman’s biological dad in Man of Steel. Or even from Crowe’s embarrassingly bad cameo as Zeus in Thor: Love and Thunder. The film plays up the rift between Kraven and his half-brother, Dmitri Kravinoff (Fred Hechinger), and their father. But at no point is anything in this movie convincing — especially not the substandard CGI animals or the ludicrous depiction of the Rhino (Alessandro Nivola). It’s not even a fun movie to hate — it’s just bad.
4. Poolman
On some level, it’s understandable why Chris Pine wanted to write, direct, and star in his own movie. Plenty of actors try to stretch their wings into the creative side of the industry. Unfortunately, Pine wears his influences on his sleeves as Poolman essentially rips off the main character of the Coen brothers‘ The Big Lebowski and drops him into the plot of Chinatown.
That may sound like a joke, but Darren Barrenman (Pine) is very Dude-like, minus Jeff Bridges’ humor and charisma. And Darren really does find his way into a derivative Chinatown-like water and land scandal. Pine clearly loved those movies without comprehending how to replicate the things that made them entertaining and memorable. Poolman‘s only saving grace is that so few people saw it in theaters that it might be quickly forgotten and buried.
3. Borderlands
A movie hasn’t tried this hard to be Guardians of the Galaxy since the first Suicide Squad film in 2016. But Borderlands falls victim to the recurring theme on this list because of its inability to recognize or understand what made the movies that inspired it work. How do you squander a cast that includes Cate Blanchett, Kevin Hart, Jack Black, and Jamie Lee Curtis? Director Eli Roth found a way, or perhaps the blame lies with Tim Miller (Deadpool), who oversaw the pricey reshoots.
The Borderlands games are fun to play and they have more personality than any of the characters in this film. In fact, anti-fun seems like the best description for the Borderlands movie. It’s a joyless slog to watch and a reminder that just because you can make a movie adaptation, it doesn’t mean that you should.
2. The Crow
Speaking of things that shouldn’t have been made, The Crow is a prime example of that. There have been a few attempts to remake the 1994 original movie, both on TV and in some low-budget sequels. But this is the one that may finally kill the franchise once and for all. Everything that was so hauntingly tragic about Brandon Lee’s take on the character is lost with Bill Skarsgård’s seemingly Juggalo-inspired incarnation of Eric Draven.
The Crow has some unintended comedy when it halts in its tracks to give Eric a love story with Shelley (FKA Twigs) just so he can feel the need to come back from the grave for revenge when they both get murdered. The first film got that point across without having a literally demonic villain, Vincent Roeg (Danny Huston), who sends Shelley’s soul to hell. And as intimidating as Skarsgård was as Pennywise the Dancing Clown in Stephen King’s It, he’s not exactly a force of nature as he embarks on his quest for revenge. Director Rupert Sanders pulled off a near-impossible feat with The Crow: He made his Ghost in the Shell movie look good by comparison.
1. Madame Web
We very nearly went with The Crow for No. 1 on this list, and Borderlands was also a strong candidate to cap off the year’s worst films. Both of those flicks are abysmal, but they’re also destined to be forgotten. No one is going to forget Madame Web. This is a comic book movie that is so off-the-scales awful that it’s going to be remembered in the same way that people still talk about Howard the Duck decades later. Outgoing Sony Pictures CEO Tony Vinciquerra recently defended Madame Web and Kraven the Hunter by saying “the press decided that they didn’t want us making these films… and the critics just destroyed them.”
The fact that Vinciquerra can’t recognize that Madame Web and Kraven were terrible goes a long way toward explaining why they are. Dakota Johnson’s main character, Cassie Web, is so incredibly unlikable that not even the actress seems interested in her. We’ve rarely seen such a lifeless performance in a leading role, but Johnson seems determined to go through the motions even though Cassie is far from compelling.
Borderlands may not have made the most of its cast, but Madame Web goes one step further by casting a trio of rising stars — Sydney Sweeney, Isabela Merced, and Celeste O’Connor — all of whom had the potential to steal the movie out from under Johnson if they were given something meaningful to do. It says a lot about a film that the brief moments that Sweeney, Merced, and O’Connor are in costume as future Spider-Women are more exciting than anything else in the story. But those are just teases that Madame Web never delivers on.
Madame Web compounds its sins by shamelessly trying to tie itself as closely to Spider-Man as possible by including Ben Parker (Adam Scott) as a supporting character and featuring the birth of his famous nephew, Peter Parker, as well. The film’s villain, Ezekiel Sims (Tahar Rahim), is the Spider-Man that you’d order from Wish with a costume from Spirit Halloween. Sony’s hubris was on full display when it released Madame Web, and the studio continues to feign confusion over its failure. That’s why it deserves the dubious honor of being named the worst movie of 2024.
