The Worst Movies of All Time

Most film buffs seek out the best that cinema has to offer, but some people have a fascination with the epic fails—that is, the movies considered to be the worst. It comes as no surprise that lists, books, and websites dedicated to Hollywood’s biggest flops and trashiest B-movies are about as common as those dedicated to celebrated screen classics. In the spirit of Encyclopædia Britannica’s article “The Best Movies of All Time,” the following is an attempt to compile a list using prominent sources on film and entertainment to determine which movies are the worst.

Box-office bombs

For many in the motion picture industry, the telltale sign of a bad movie is poor ticket sales. Though many commercial duds are also undeniably great films, sometimes the numbers reveal hard truths. According to Guinness World Records, for many years the biggest box-office bomb of all time was Cutthroat Island (1995), a pirate-themed swashbuckler directed by Renny Harlin and starring Geena Davis and Matthew Modine. The movie cost an estimated $98 million but only made about $10 million domestically. In The New York Times, Janet Maslin took several swipes at its big budget: “Its excesses (just sit through the numbing list of closing credits) prompt nostalgia for the good old days when sensationalism was cheap.”

Since then, several films have surpassed Cutthroat Island, such as the 2012 Mars-themed action epic John Carter and the 2023 superhero movie The Marvels, both Disney projects. Forbes magazine reported that production costs for the latter film ballooned to more than $370 million, but its worldwide gross was a relatively paltry $206 million.

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Other box-office bombs of note include Michael Cimino’s western Heaven’s Gate (1980), which made less than $4 million worldwide (with a reported $44 million budget) and was considered a huge disappointment after the director’s Oscar-winning Vietnam War epic The Deer Hunter (1978). The crime comedy Gigli (2003) earned little more than 10 percent of its $54 million production costs and was savaged by critics. In the long run it became more famous as the movie that sparked a real-life romance (plus a billion tabloid headlines) between costars Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck.

Another big box-office blunder was Cats (2019), an adaptation of the long-running Andrew Lloyd Webber musical that features computer-generated imagery (CGI) and an all-star cast, including Jennifer Hudson, Ian McKellen, James Corden, Idris Elba, Taylor Swift, and Judi Dench. Star power couldn’t save the film, however. On its opening weekend the $95 million movie made an abysmal $6 million domestically and never fully recovered its losses. Some critics declared its CGI technology to be “creepy” and “unsettling”; Variety called it an “uneven eyesore” and a “half-digested hairball of a movie.”

As for the lowest-grossing movie of all time, the honor goes to the 2006 thriller Zyzzyx Rd, starring Katherine Heigl and Tom Sizemore, which hauled in a grand total of $30 at the box office. Thirty. Dollars. The movie played once a day for one week in a single theater in Dallas, reportedly for the sole purpose of satisfying a distribution agreement with the Screen Actors Guild before the international DVD release.

The critics: Thumbs down and less-than-zero stars

Perhaps the most authoritative sources for the worst movies of all time are professional film critics. Just as a good review from a well-regarded critic can boost a movie’s chances of finding an audience, a bad review can tank a movie into obscurity. An exceptionally bad review, however, can be a movie’s springboard into immortality.

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Of the three disappointing sequels to Steven Spielberg’s 1975 blockbuster Jaws, the third one, Jaws: The Revenge (1987; directed by Joseph Sargent), is the most memorable, if only for the walloping it got by reviewers. Chicago-based film critics Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel held nothing back when they discussed the film on their popular televised movie-review program, Siskel & Ebert & the Movies. Both critics gave the movie a thumbs down. But first they spent several minutes riffing on its “idiotic script,” “lousy gimmick[s],” and “logical errors,” noting that one scene shows Michael Caine climbing out of the ocean onto a boat wearing a dry shirt. Choice comments in their review include Siskel’s reaction to the film’s multiple dream sequences (“I wanna go up and punch a hole in the screen”) and Ebert’s question about the Jaws series’ seemingly endless supply of vindictive sharks: “What shark is this? Is this like a cousin, a nephew, a next-door neighbor?”

Two years later Siskel and Ebert notoriously trounced the teen comedy She’s Out of Control (1989), starring Tony Danza as an overprotective father who becomes disturbed by his nerdy daughter’s beauty makeover. Siskel declared the movie “a sinkhole of tawdry values” and famously said, “When I saw She’s Out of Control I became so depressed I actually thought about quitting my job as a film critic, feeling as though the movies had abandoned me.” Ebert called the movie “a crime because…it robs life from people by requiring them to spend two hours having such a terrible experience happen to them.” (Remarkably, Danza was among Ebert’s guests when the critic received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame years later.)

Instead of the “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” favored by Siskel and Ebert, film historian and author Leonard Maltin used star ratings in his reviews. But as he explained in his annual movie guide (last published in 2014), “bottom-of-the-barrel movies” don’t even warrant a star—the worst are merely designated “BOMB.” Maltin named the 1938 anti-marijuana flick Reefer Madness as “the granddaddy of all ‘Worst’ movies.” Other Maltin BOMBs of note include Freddy Got Fingered (2001; “the poster child for all that’s wrong with movie comedy”) and the Che Guevara biopic Che! (1969; “you haven’t lived until you see [Jack] Palance play Fidel Castro”).

Unlike Siskel, Ebert, and Maltin, some critics have devoted their careers to rating bad movies. Joe Bob Briggs, the alter ego of John Bloom, began exclusively reviewing drive-in flicks in the early 1980s for the Dallas Times Herald. His summaries focus on the heart and soul of bad movies: the number of corpses, monsters, alien abductions, naked body parts, kung fu scenes, sword fights, and quarts of spilled blood. Joe Bob’s three favorite drive-in movies are George A. Romero’s zombie classic Night of the Living Dead (1968), Tobe Hooper’s slasher film The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), and Frank Henenlotter’s Basket Case (1982), which he praised for its “excellent blood scenes.”

Razzies: The award for most unwatchable film goes to…

In 1981 John Wilson, a movie-trailer production worker in California, hosted the first Golden Raspberry Awards in his living room. Also known as the Razzies, the not-so-coveted prizes honor the worst pictures of the year. The idea for the Razzies came to Wilson after walking out of a double feature of two disco musicals: Xanadu (1980) starring Olivia Newton-John and Can’t Stop the Music (1980) starring the Village People. Since then, the Razzies have grown into a full-scale event held annually in Hollywood. More than 700 voting members pick the “winners” in such categories as worst screen couple and worst remake/rip-off/sequel. Some celebs, such as Sandra Bullock for her performance in the comedy All About Steve (2009), have even attended the ceremony to graciously accept their gold spray-painted trophies (value: $4.97 each). The table below lists the films that have received the most Razzies.

Cult classics: So bad, they’re good

Many terrible and cheesy movies have a devoted fan base. Likewise, many directors who specialized (intentionally or otherwise) in making bad movies are revered by film buffs. Roger Corman earned himself the nickname “King of the B-movies” for his long and fruitful career making low-budget exploitation films. His masterpieces include Teenage Cave Man (1958), The Cry Baby Killer (1958; the film that marked Jack Nicholson’s screen debut), A Bucket of Blood (1959), and The Little Shop of Horrors (1960). Russ Meyer produced such sleazy spectacles as Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965) and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970; a screenwriting collaboration with Ebert). Prolific action-movie schlockmeister Godfrey Ho gave the cinema world Robo Vampire (1988) and Zombie vs. Ninja (1989), to name a few. John Waters, director of such tasteless fare as Pink Flamingos (1972), Polyester (1981), and the relatively mainstream Hairspray (1988), proudly embraces his title as “the Pope of Trash.”

Of the filmmakers in the running for worst director of all time, Ed Wood is considered by many to be the strongest contender. His campy creations include Glen or Glenda (1953) and Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959), which itself has been called the worst movie ever made. Leonard Maltin deemed this goofy science-fiction debacle, which stars Bela Lugosi, Vampira, and Tor Johnson, “so mesmerizingly awful it actually improves (so to speak) with each viewing.”

People’s choice: Rotten Tomatoes and IMDb

The web offers numerous sites for movie information, including those that allow users to rate films. Among the most popular are Rotten Tomatoes and the Internet Movie Database (IMDb). For Rotten Tomatoes, users either rate a movie positively as “Fresh” (signified by a red tomato) or negatively as “Rotten” (indicated with a green splat). IMDb users choose a star rating on a scale of 1 to 10. The tables below show the 10 lowest-rated movies on the two sites.