Top 20 Worst Films Of 2023

2023 was a very turbulent year for the film industry. In an event that I wouldn’t be surprised if it was the basis for its own movie later on down the line, the impeding threat of artificial intelligence on people who actually work to create things led both of the major Hollywood unions, the Writers Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild, to jointly go on strike. Deals have since been struck, but between codifying the frankly surreal situation that the industry is in right now post-COVID, and the delays and marketing muffles that resulted from the strikes, it’s a situation that will likely ripple out into 2024 and beyond.

That defining moment goes some way to explain how weird the bad moments of the year had gotten (not saying that media creatives wanting a fair wage and job security is a bad thing, but them being in the position of needing to negotiate for them sure as fuck is). Films with decent and even high expectations fell short, filmmakers try to go big and just wound up embarrassing themselves, and fan-favourite franchises, IPs, and even entire sub-genres hit such a low point that I found myself completely souring on them. Truly, this was a time of sudden, jarring changes.

Compared to last year’s list, there’s also more entries on here that go beyond mere dissatisfaction and right into active irritation and even anger at times, meaning that quite a bit of what’s on here is likely worse than what showed up there. So, let’s join together and flip off the previous year’s trash as it shrinks in the rear view, with a look at my picks for the Top 20 Worst Films of 2023.

Black Adam (2022) - Movie Review

As much as my growing disappointment with quite a few films that 2022 has had to offer may argue against this, I like to think of myself as the ‘last line of defence’ of film critics. Over the past eight years of writing on this blog, as well as my commissions for FilmInk, I have always tried to find the positives in whatever film I watch. It doesn’t always work out that way, but I genuinely think that I have yet to watch a film that has literally zero merit to it. If a new film has come out, and it has been either disregarded or just lambasted by other critics, chances are good that I have at least one good thing to say about it, if not several.

That goes double for superhero films. While I get the inherent problems with how much of a stranglehold the genre has on the industry nowadays, I personally can’t find it in myself to lambast the art as a result of that. I love superhero stories. When they’re done well, they can make for just the right kind of storytelling that tap into that part of me that holds onto the ideals of goodness within humanity like a life preserver. I may not want every film to be like that, and indeed not every film should, but I usually have a lot of nice words for the ones I come across.

To put it simply, in order for a superhero film to get on my bad side, it has to be a particularly crap example of the genre. I mean, I was able to unironically vibe with parts of Morbius, just to show how lenient I can be with this kind of fare. But then I come across stuff like this, which feel like they exist solely to validate every single criticism that has been levelled at the genre and its effect on the industry over the past decade and a half.

Why I'm Not Reviewing Shazam! (2019)

I’m not reviewing this movie. I’m not watching this movie at the cinema. I’m likely to never go near this movie at all. Yep, for the first time in this blog’s history, I’m instating an official boycott for a movie. Wonder Wheel and Underworld: Blood Wars may have gotten me in the mindset of boycotting whatever came next, but this is the first time I’ve actively done so. The reason why is both complicated and rather depressing, so let’s try and go into this as even-handedly as possible.