Top 20 Worst Films Of 2022

2022 saw the world slowly start to return to normal (or whatever can be considered ‘normal’ for us nowadays) after COVID threw everything out of whack across 2020 and 2021. Public spaces were opening back up, the collective mood was much less dire, and the cinemas were bringing back the big tentpole blockbusters that usually mark the year as it passes. At a time when the life expectancy of the physical cinema was beginning to look like it’s on its death knell, between streaming and their closure during lockdown, film releases began to feel like events again. And on top of that, some of those event releases turned out really damn good, and we’ll absolutely be looking at a few of those when we get to the Best Of list.

Of course, with that return to normalcy also came the return of the usual bleh-ness of mainstream cinema, where a lot of the year wound up just being ‘okay’ or slightly-less-than, and I say that as someone who still liked most of what I saw this year. There was a larger amount of disappointment to the year’s produce as well, where I found myself really looking forward to films that wound up falling short.

Hell, this might be the first time I actively went out of my way not to watch movies, turning down FilmInk commissions to review Amsterdam and the new Fantastic Beasts sequel because, quite literally, you couldn’t pay me to give any kind of attention to the shitpersons at the heart of those productions. As such, this list won’t be as vitriolic as in past years, since most of what I consider this year’s worst films land more on the underwhelming and disappointing side of things than outright making me angry. Oh, rest assured, some of these still got me riled up, but not nearly as many as I was expecting.

But even with how many I passed on, I still managed to watch enough films to fill up this list. As such, let’s go over my picks for the Top 20 Worst Films Of 2022.

Top 20 Worst Films Of 2020

2020 was a shit year. Duh. However, this was a shit year even beyond the metrics that other recent years have been shit, like the one-two-punch to our ideal of cultural heroes over 2016-2017. As terrifying as it already is to be under constant threat of plague all bloody year thanks to COVID-19, the extent to which it affected our lives and even our entertainment was something else entirely. It felt like large-scale hubris for 2019, the Omnicorp-isation of Disney, and then in comes a plague no-one seemed properly prepared to deal with, that threw a monkey wrench into a system everyone was far too confident could withstand whatever came at it.

The release schedule was in a continual state of shuffling throughout, meaning that a lot of big-name productions got delayed ‘til next year, and with varying degrees of lockdown worldwide, cinema attendance took a sharp dive, to the point that not only were there more classic movies being shown than anything new just to fill up the cinemas that were still open, but a lot of independent cinemas likely won’t survive if this continues for much longer. And at a time when all we had was our screens to alleviate the cabin fever, it felt like we were more in need of entertainment than ever.

As a result of all this, a lot of what makes up the worst that 2020’s cinema had to offer comes down to a matter of releasing anything and everything that could be spared just to keep butts in seats and eyes on screens, meaning that there was quite a bit of disposable garbage that filled in the margins. Not only that, but there were a lot of astonishingly miscalculated attempts to say something meaningful so that this year wasn’t a total waste as a pop culture moment, which only ended up making this whole situation feel even worse. And since all that time indoors gave me plenty of space to write up more reviews than any previous year, there are quite a few movies that surely deserve to be on this list, but only just missed the cut. Jeff Wadlow should be counting his blessings that Fantasy Island got passed up because, as you’re about to see, I have no mercy in stock for the 20 that made it in. As such, let’s stop waffling on and get into my picks for the 20 Worst Films Of 2020.