The top 10 worst movies on Netflix, ranked
Netflix is full of good movies, there’s no arguing with that. Not for nothing is it one of the most popular streaming services. But in amongst the good stuff there’s some real stinkers, movies so bad it boggles the mind as to how they got made in the first place.
There’s plenty of these terrible movies on the platform, but these ten are the worst offenders. Watch them for the sake of mockery, or plain don’t watch them at all.
The Divergent Series: Allegiant (2016)
When the Divergent series came out, people saw it as simply riding on the coattails of the Hunger Games’ success. Certainly it didn’t seem to have anything new to say about how a world becomes a dystopia. And it bombed at the box office so hard that it actually killed the whole franchise, meaning the story never got finished onscreen. Basically, it was a big disappointment to everyone, including fans of the original books.
The Cat in the Hat (2003)
The movie that arguably sounded the death knell on Mike Myers’ non-Shrek career. He was under nightmare-inducing prosthetics to play Dr Seuss’s Cat in a story that had all the charm sucked out of it. It was considered one of the worst films of 2003, and in fact it was so bad that Seuss’s widow, Audrey Geisel, put the kibosh on any more live-action versions of her husband’s work.
Bright (2017)
Will Smith is a cop with an orc for a partner in this supposed-to-be-gritty fantasy adventure. That sounds like a great premise for a movie but the execution is beyond terrible. It’s a film that thinks it’s making grand social commentary on race, but fails so badly as to be offensive. Inexplicably, it was actually very successful with viewers, but critics savaged it and rightly so. Oh, and it was also written by Max Landis, who has sexual abuse allegations against him, so there’s another reason to avoid it.
The Bubble (2022)
I watched The Bubble for two main reasons: Karen Gillan and Pedro Pascal. They’re great actors and their presence was surely going to elevate this COVID comedy, I thought. Plus, the snippets in the trailer of the film-within-a-film, the ridiculously named Cliff Beasts 6: Battle for Everest – Memories of a Requiem looked funny. Well, I was wrong. The movie is not funny, and Gillan and Pascal are not good in it. I forgive them, but I don’t forgive the scriptwriters.
Death Note (2017)
The live-action version of Death Note spawned a huge controversy. Was it okay for the characters to be changed from Japanese to American? The producers insisted it was, that this was simply an American take on a Japanese story, but plenty of other people thought it wasn’t. Then the film came out and it proved to be a mess that even Willem Dafoe couldn’t save. Now it’s remembered as little more than the whitewashed, bad version of Death Note.
The Emoji Movie
Everyone knew from the beginning that The Emoji Movie would be terrible, and they were right. It was a cheap cash-grab about the emojis that live inside a smartphone, with a derivative plot and almost no jokes that will amuse anyone above the age of five. What the hell is Patrick Stewart doing in this? And as the poop emoji?!
Thunder Force
“Superhero movies are popular and Melissa McCarthy comedies are popular! Quick, let’s combine them both!” Pity the poor soul at Netflix who said this. Thunder Force is all about McCarthy and her estranged best friend Octavia Spencer getting superpowers, and it’s not funny in the slightest—it’s desperately boring and predictable, actually. Even the worst of the MCU movies are much better than this.
The Ridiculous Six (2015)
This Adam Sandler comedy-Western is about the same level of “comedy” as most Adam Sandler movies are. It has a good cast that includes Terry Crews, Luke Wilson and Will Forte (why, Will, why?!), and all of them must have kicked themselves for years for signing on to this mess. It’s one of the few films to have a 0% rating on RottenTomatoes, and it was offensive too—some of the Native American actors walked off the set in protest of the film’s portrayal of their culture.
Madame Web (2024)
After the failure of Morbius (sadly not available on Netflix) no-one thought the Sony’s Spider-Man Universe could sink any lower. But sink lower it did! Madame Web was even worse than Morbius because it was boring as well as bad. Everyone involved, including star Dakota Johnson, looking like they were acting with guns to their heads. But on the other hand, it gave the world some great memes?
Fifty Shades of Grey (2015)
Here’s Dakota Johnson again. I’m so sorry, Dakota Johnson, but man do you need to pick better movies. Then again, no-one could have saved Fifty Shades of Grey. It’s based on a very bad book about a BDSM relationship, and it has no redeeming features whatsoever. It was very popular with audiences at the time, but many a person has looked back at the movie’s box office success and gone, “What were we all thinking?!”
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