The Worst Films of 2025

2025 has been a great year for film, Sinners and One Battle After Another breaking out to become cultural touchstones is one of the coolest things to happen in cinema in years. There has also (as always) been some terrible stuff released this year, some making billions and becoming the biggest hits of the year and some being dumped unceremoniously on streaming services. 

I do not go out of my way to watch things I don’t think I’ll like (most of the time), so this is perhaps not exactly a comprehensive list of the true bottom of the barrel of the year, and I will be avoiding some particularly easy targets (hello, A Minecraft Movie), but here is a list of what I thought to be the worst films of 2025.

Lilo and Stitch

I never expect much from the live-action Disney remakes, in fact I don’t want most of them. There is a good chance this year’s Snow White is worse but there’s no evidence of that because no one in the whole world has seen it. That being said I had a glimmer of hope for this one. 

This is largely because they hired Dean Fleischer-Camp to direct hot off the back of his lovely 2022 animated film Marcel the Shell with Shoes On. It seemed like maybe he would have some kind of new spin on the film that would justify its existence. And like many have been asking for, there are changes made, it is not a shot-for-shot remake like some of this stuff is.

Unfortunately, the changes are all horrendous. Most of the comedy is just entirely absent, the new additions are excruciating (a particular scene where Stitch gets his name because someone says a car seat will need stitching comes to mind), and most importantly, character arcs are rewritten in a way that renders characters who should be lovable very nefarious. Whereas the original centres overcoming difficulty to make unconventional family work, this film decides the right decision is for Lilo’s sister to not care for her and give her up to social services. But it’s okay, becomes she says hello out of a portal every now and then.

This isn’t to mention that it manages to film Hawaii in such a way that it looks like they never left a green screen room, and that it has a pace which makes its 108 minutes feel like 500. A horrendous effort, Lilo and Stitch confirms that even if you decide to not replicate a film one-to-one, these remakes are indefensible.

Holland

You probably haven’t heard of the film Holland. The film, which came out in March on Amazon Prime, stars Nicole Kidman, Matthew Macfadyen, Gael Garcia Bernal and even has some Rachel Sennot in it, and was directed by Mimi Cave who only a couple of years ago made a big splash with Fresh, the Sebastian Stan/Daisy Edgar-Jones cannibalism rom-com movie.

All those things point to a film that should have at least been something. But I have not spoken to a single person who even knows this exists, and that is probably a good thing. Holland is essentially a Don’t Worry Darling without the intrigue of Harry Styles doing weird press. It is an astonishingly poor screenplay that feels like it’s been made about four decades too late and has no propulsion.

All the acting talent on screen is wasted. I love Nicole but she is sleepwalking through this, and I’m not even convinced Matthew Macfadyen would remember filming it. For most of its run-time it is an excruciatingly dull affair, until something finally happens about 100 minutes in just in time for the film to be over.

Holland is the type of film that in days gone by would have been a gargantuan flop, that had the possibility of stalling a few acting careers and maybe sending its director to director jail. But because of the streaming era, this thing can comfortably hide in the endless menus of Amazon Prime to be forgotten about for all eternity.

The Thursday Murder Club

For most of its runtime, The Thursday Murder Club, a film that I’m sure will go quadruple platinum in British living rooms come Christmas, is absolutely fine. It has a powerhouse roster of big British actors who will turn up for almost anything, but have enough aura to make it out unscathed, and a fun little murder-mystery plot that carries you along just fine.

It’s far from the most visually interesting thing. A mixture of it being a Netflix film (need I say more?) and it being directed by Chris Columbus – a man who will absolutely turn up and make your film in the most average way possible – leave it feeling pretty bland. But that isn’t really the appeal here.

The mystery is fun, and cosy, and pleasant. And then suddenly it isn’t. I won’t spoil the film, just in case, but the way I would describe the ending best is malevolent. The film doesn’t frame it as such, it’s supposed to be a happy, neat conclusion. Instead, it is downright evil. As a friend I watched it with remarked, it feels like a Reform UK type ending.

Just to not drag anyone who doesn’t deserve it, apparently this is absolutely not how the book ends. Richard Osman, the original writer, has raised concerns over it, which leads one to wonder why you would write something like this into what should be a breezy family film. Maybe stick to the book on this one rather than experience the surprising anguish Netflix’s The Thursday Murder Club entails.

Opus/Death of a Unicorn

Despite managing to successfully market themselves as a beacon of hope for indie cinema, A24 have had a weird year – especially at the beginning of 2025, when they released Opus and Death of a Unicorn back-to-back. These are two films that feel like SNL parodies of what A24 has become known for, and both are very bad.

Opus is probably the worse of the two. It is a plot that is straight out of that “Aren’t rich people bad, guys, don’t you get it?” sub-genre which has been getting progressively more annoying in the past couple years, except this time it’s about a rich musician, not a rich chef or tech guy etc.

Said rich musician is played by a career-worst John Malkovich, whose scenery chewing should be fun but is seemingly trying to reach for some misplaced profundity. The film also boasts Ayo Edebiri as its lead, who is not bad in this but should be getting much better roles that suit her very strong skill set. 

At the end of the day, Opus’s worst crime is that it is deeply unoriginal and annoying. This also could be said of Death of a Unicorn, another film with a strong (in parts) cast but incredibly irritating screenplay. The central idea of “What if a Unicorn was mean and evil?” doesn’t really justify 107 minutes, and anything else it tries to achieve has even less substance for it, like a half-hearted satire of the pharmaceutical industry and an unbelievably stale parent-child arc between Paul Rudd (at his least likeable) and Jenna Ortega doing the Jenna Ortega thing.

Both the films speak to a film studio in a bit of a crisis and the dangers of trying your film output to a certain set of tropes. 

Honey Don’t 

I don’t think many people would be mad if you claimed that the Coen Brothers are some of the best filmmakers of the last century. They have made some of the best and most culturally important films of their time and have barely a miss in their 40-year careers. This makes Honey Don’t, the latest solo film from Ethan Coen, very confusing.

His second non-brothers film after last year’s Drive Away Dolls (which is a film I quite like), Honey Don’t feels like it is a film being made by someone who hasn’t made anything before in their lives. It follows Margaret Qualley, who was also the lead in his previous effort, solving a small town mystery in a classic Fargo-y Coens type plot.

The problem, among many others, is that the plot doesn’t really exist. I’m all in favour of plotless films, but if your film is a detective story, it helps if there is something there. Things just sort of happen in Honey Don’t, then they stop happening when it ends. When the film rolled credits I was genuinely baffled that that was it, leaving almost every single plot thread unresolved.

The performances aren’t bad, Qualley is doing her thing, Aubrey Plaza and Chris Evans also show up and are clearly having a bit of fun, but there’s almost nothing for them to do. The script feels like it was written in about two seconds on a post-it-note and then actors were told to just do something.

This is maybe the film I dislike the least on this list, mostly because I’m just in awe of how something like this exists – it is definitely the most baffling and the one that should, in theory, not be ending up on a ‘worst of’ list.