10 Films That Are As Bad As You've Heard

During a Cannes Lions panel, Will Smith commented that when studios tricked audiences into paying to see a bad movie with a trailer that showed lots of explosions, it used to be several days before the bad word of mouth spread. These days, audiences were tweeting their disapproval within the first ten minutes.

He got a taste of that two months later when Suicide Squad opened to less than glowing reviews, with most critics using words like “messy” and “confused.” You can attribute the film’s massive commercial success ($643 million and counting) to one simple question: is it really that bad?

The theory that audiences will flock to cinemas simply to see how bad a particular movie is probably goes back to Cleopatra (1963), which has much in common with your typical blockbuster: a troubled production with a ballooning budget, big stars whose on set behaviour became legendary and reams of negative publicity. When the movie finally opened, viewers weren’t interested in watching a four hour saga of the Nile, they just wanted to see what all the fuss was about.

When audiences start going to the movies just to see train wrecks, it has an impact on the types of films Hollywood decides to make. If you’ve ever paid to see a film because you thought it would be bad, then each of the following is on some level your fault.

Imagine the fun that Mystery Science Theater 3000 could have with a needless sequel that refuses to make sense at several points and whose dialogue lands with a thud every few minutes. Terminator Genisys is such a sequel, a movie so awkwardly contrived and crassly commercial that it deserves to lampooned as ruthlessly as possible.

There’s so much rich material here: the groan-inducing attempts at humour, the characters who keep explaining their motivation to each other and the shameless attempts at fan service. Then there’s the alternate timeline that causes Kyle Reese to experience a live he never lived, where his younger self keeps repeating “Genisys is Skynet.” Erm, what?

Wading through it all is Arnold Schwarzenegger, who by now bears more resemblance to Moonraker-era Roger Moore than the character we saw in The Terminator: all his character does is make dreadful puns, rescue the damsel in distress and smirk for the camera.