Publication Date: 01-04-2026

Steve Pulaski’s Top 10 Worst Films of 2025

Building my annual “top 10” list of favorite films for 2025 was more difficult than in years past. The highs this year were stratospherically high, and I am omitting a couple movies I would’ve bet ended up making the list just a few months back. This was a tremendous year for variety, and for the first time since perhaps the late aughts, it felt like some of the biggest movies of the year didn’t exclusively belong to franchise tentpoles.

I had real struggles compiling this worst list. I only gave four movies one-and-a-half-stars or lower; a record low. I had to plug some movies off of my “mediocre” list, which wasn’t easy, as most of them were just that. I like my worst lists to have some power with how truly awful the inclusions are, but this was not a year in which I saw many truly bad movies.

I answer this question a lot. I am indeed an AMC Stubs A-List member. Better yet, some of my closest friends in the city in which I reside work at the movie theater. Moreover, some of the only math I like doing comes during this time of the year. Thanks to my Stubs membership, I paid approximately $3.15/ticket, having seen 80 movies in the theater. FULL DISCLOSURE: That number is based on new movies (those released theatrically for the first time ever in 2025). I did not count older films I watched in theaters, such as the 25th anniversary re-release of Dogma nor the Halloween-week screening of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Those films are not eligible for AMC Stubs reservations either.

That’s amazing value, and if you’re someone who goes to the movies at least two or three times a month (or could see yourself going at that rate, for that matter), and have an AMC Theaters near you, you need to become a member.

Without further adieu, here are my picks for the worst films of 2025.

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1. Fight or Flight: I would rather endure three hours of raucous inflight turbulence than watch even 10 minutes of Fight or Flight again. Here’s a film that’s basically a copy-of-a-copy to the point that its current iteration might as well be an impressionistic collage of ink-spots with all life and originally Xeroxed into indistinguishable nothingness.

What should be a mile-high cat-and-mouse game involving two professionals outwitting one another instead boils down to a sluggish and meandering movie filled with painful dialog and incessant start-stops. Too absent from an already discombobulated mess is a consistent tone. At times, Josh Hartnett’s Reyes wants to be menacing. At others, he’s a jokester, and Fight or Flight uneasily oscillates with his inconsistent personality. Hartnett looking and feeling miscast doesn’t help matters either; he does a lot of mugging and damage controlling, but absent is that sinister sociopathy we saw displayed so enthusiastically in last year’s Trap.

My review of Fight or Flight

2. Love Hurts: With Love Hurts, 87North delivers their most egregious miscalculation yet. It’s already disappointing that any theatrical movie resembling a comedy these days has to feature wall-to-wall violence in order to pass. Then, you’re greeted with one as tonally erratic and messy as this one and the sheer relief is that it barely qualifies as a feature, at roughly 77 minutes before credits.

My review of Love Hurts

3. Keeper: This is very likely the first time in my 16-year history of writing film reviews where a director behind my #1 favorite film from the year prior, had a movie that appeared on my “worst” list the subsequent year. Hey, at least Osgood Perkins gave us The Monkey this year too.

Startlingly soulless, underwritten to the point of being weightless, and centered around two characters with the personalities of dish-towels, Keeper begins like all questionable horror movies: with a couple headed off to a cabin in the woods. By this point in time, any horror movie that results in a pair of characters going to a remote home in the middle of nowhere begs a good explanation. Such a qualifier doesn’t exist in Keeper, along with a surplus of other things that would make a good movie.

My review of Keeper

4. I Know What You Did Last Summer: For 80s and 90s babies, I Know What You Did Last Summer served as something of a gateway drug for the horror genre, especially following Wes Craven’s Scream only a year after its release. The film’s concept and charismatic cast, in addition to naturally fungible memory, might have you misremembering the 1997 slasher was a good movie. It wasn’t. Neither were its two sequels.

Unfortunately, I Know What You Did Last Summer fits right in with the series in terms of being another lousy and derivative slasher. Similar to the recent Scream sequels, its new characters are one dimensional, and the return of familiar faces, Freddie Prinze Jr, Jennifer Love Hewitt, and Sarah Michelle Gellar (in a cameo), leaves much to be desired. Further compounding what quickly dissolves into a hopelessly embittering experience is the sheer lack of grace in the filmmaking department.

My review of I Know What You Did Last Summer (2025)

5. Wolf Man: “Leigh Whannell has rewritten the blueprint for how to successfully remake and reimagine a horror classic,” I wrote in my review of his reboot of The Invisible Man five years ago. It was slick, scary, and satisfying. The rare four-star horror movie that furthered emphasized Whannell’s greatness as a writer/director. There was all the reason in the world to be excited when he was announced as the one who would helm Wolf Man, a reboot of my personal favorite Universal monster movie from 1941. That excitement drains rapidly after an engaging first act dissolves into rudimentary jump scares with the lack of character development catching up to the story. On top of that, its descent into literal darkness makes this one of the most visually ugly horror movies perhaps since Albino Farm, which at least had the excuse of being shot on a shoestring budget.

My review of Wolf Man (2025)

6. Smurfs: Rihanna is Smurfette. Haven’t you heard? Nearly every poster, one-sheet, trailer, and TV commercial for the new Smurfs movie makes the bold proclamation. Rihanna is also a producer on the film, credited as her legal name, “Robyn Rihanna Fenty,” so you know it’s serious. The declaration that “Rihanna is Smurfette” is so brazenly apparent on nearly every piece of paratext for this film that it might as well be its tagline. This iteration of Smurfs is a musical, and it’s a real pity the blue cretins didn’t break out into singing “S&M” at any point.

Whatever. I guess it’s no weirder than this being the third cinematic iteration of The Smurfs in the last 14 years. Raja Gosnell helmed the first two films for Sony Pictures Animation, and there was a separate, fully-animated feature released back in 2017 to little fanfare. Peyo‘s material certainly has gone the distance, although I still don’t understand the longevity of the diminutive blue creatures that, for decades, have done so much on TV and in film yet leave very little impact. Now it’s Paramount’s turn to keep the intellectual property alive and well.

My review of Smurfs (2025)

7. M3GAN 2.0: Part of me feels bad for including M3GAN 2.0 on my “worst” list due to the fact that it’s nothing if not ambitious. Unsuccessful, maybe, but clearly director Gerard Johnstone and company didn’t want to rehash the same formula for a quick, run-of-the-mill sequel.

At its essence, M3GAN 2.0 takes the Terminator 2: Judgment Day approach in having the villain team up with the protagonists to take down an even greater threat to humanity. The material’s grin-inducing humor is sadly no match for complicated plotting and sterile dialog, the presence of which drains the charisma out of a concept that was recently enjoyable on both an entertainment and subtextual level.

My review of M3GAN 2.0

8. Happy Gilmore 2: Unlike many others, Happy Gilmore never stuck out to me as anything other than a mediocre Adam Sandler vehicle. Sure, he might’ve dropped the cloying accents he employed in films like Billy Madison and The Waterboy, but the concept of a manchild, failed hockey player using rage to fuel his golf game was little more than an opportunity for Sandler to scream and shout his way through a movie. The result was light on laughs. I don’t pretend to be in the majority.

Happy Gilmore 2 might break Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F‘s record of being relevant on Netflix for seven days, as opposed to six, but it has all the hallmarks of a modern legacyquel. Simultaneously, it feels like too much and too little, and it revives characters that just look sad in their older age, played by actors hungry for a large streaming check. Ultimately, like so many sequels to popular comedies, it lacks the spirit of its predecessor, which centered around making a good movie and nothing more. So much of this feels akin to a golfer going on tilt to the point of embarrassing himself.

My review of Happy Gilmore 2

9. Freakier Friday: Freakier Friday is a sequel that probably should’ve been made within three-to-five years of the original. However, since everything old is new again, and Hollywood is thriving on digging up the bones of millennial culture, it’s never too late to double-back and take care of business. If you enjoyed the 2003 film, I’ll assume you’ll find this one amusing. For me, I recognize that Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan aren’t as ubiquitous in films as they once were, so to see them funnel time and energy into this seems like a waste of both their talents.

Freakier Friday is marginally better than other belated legacyquels like Good Burger 2 and Zoey 102, but when the floor is set so low, even the mediocre starts to appear desirable.

My review of Freakier Friday

10. Green and Gold: As a die-hard, (nearly) lifelong Chicago Bears fan, you know right off the bat I don’t go out of my way to read about nor invest much time in the Green Bay Packers. Even as an NFL fan, they’re the team to which I pay the least attention.

I can’t let my bias affect Green and Gold (brought to you by Culver’s), a new film that bleeds its titular colors. When you break it down, this is a story about a Christian farmer, who took out so many loans that he makes a degenerate bet on his football team in order to save his property, and a handout proves to be his saving grace. To say the irony will be lost on the film’s target audience is as accurate as saying the Packers themselves will almost exclusively be a team that’s good enough to make the playoffs yet too conservative to go “all-in” for a chance to be great.

My review of Green and Gold

Steve’s Top 10 Favorite Films of 2025