Top Ten Worst Films of 2023 (Part One)
This is kind of an unusual year, I’m actually finding it difficult to coble this list together. I have never had trouble finding material for a list like this before but this year the term “embarrassment of riches” doesn’t come close to describing the unscalable mountain of bad that Hollywood built this year.
2023 is the worst (non-plague) year in the history of motion pictures.
I hardly know where to begin.
Yes, I do.
The big winner of the worst of the worst this year was Disney.
In fact, Disney could have swept this entire list if it wasn’t for a big last-minute push by Warner Brothers. There are several factors that went into these choices when ranking this list: budget versus financial failure, bad writing, notable technical incompetence, plus my own preferences and bigotries.
I should probably include a film by Paramount just to remind people that the studio still exists (for the moment anyway). So I’ll start with them.
10. Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One.
This is the best film on this list. This isn’t really all that bad of a movie. Ethan Hunt’s latest adventure only made the list for a couple of reasons.
First, there were some serious technical deficiencies that were evident with the final cut. These were brought on by the restrictions Covid imposed on the film crew.
Second, this may actually have beaten Disney in terms of blown budget. One executive who was overly excited before the film launched, mentioned that they had spent $600 million on this film. I am assuming that this included the parts of Dead Reckoning Part Two that were filmed concurrently. If it only was for Part One, then they were completely batshit insane. There was no way in hell this movie was going to break $1.5 billion, which was what it would have needed to recoup budget plus marketing.
It also had a very unexpected problem. The Sound of Freedom ate its lunch, it had a worldwide take of $250 million and landed Angel Studios in the top ten money makers of 2023, leaving all of Tinsel Town with a “who farted” look on its face. Sound of Freedom has the exact same demographic as Mission Impossible. This is a problem for Tom Cruise because no one else in Hollywood caters to Generation X anymore.
The other problem was Oppenheimer. Dead Reckoning was locked out of the IMAX screens after its first week, that is a huge amount of premium ticket sales lost.
9. Elemental
This is the best of worst for Disney. The story wasn’t as woke as I’ve come expect from Disney but that said, it was romance between a strong woman and her simp. At a $200 -$250 million budget, this one could have made bank if it had had a typical John Lasseter-sized opening weekend. But it didn’t. The opening domestic take was $29 million. That killed any chance for it to make a profit and it didn’t.
8. The Haunted Mansion
I actually gave this one a semi-positive review (2.5/5), this equates to: If it comes on while you laying on the couch and don’t want to be bothered to change the channel, you may as well give it a chance.
Here’s what I had to say about it:
“Here’s the thing about this movie, I didn’t hate it. The plot was contrived in several places but it is a ghost story. Ben and Travis had identifiable plot arcs. Nobody else did but that was okay.
The plot wasn’t Woke at all, in some ways it was fairly old-fashioned. The joke I made the other day about a 1970s movie starring Kurt Russel and Leslie Ann Warren? Yeah, this really could have been that movie. The romantic pairing wasn’t cross-racial, (unless you count Rosario Dawson by herself) and frankly, a black couple makes more sense in New Orleans, so that part flies. There are no forced and awkward LGBTQ insertions. They don’t even bring up slavery in New Orleans. There is the possibility that a lot of those things were there and were cut at the last minute. Regardless, I have no ideological objection to this film. It will be a fine Halloween movie.
A fine, boring Halloween movie.
That is my only real objection here. This thing is just plain dull, I never laughed once. I was never particularly scared either but no one ever is scared by special effects comedies. It had all of the baseline problems that Ghostbusters (2016) had, but it didn’t have Paul Fieg and the cast making them worse. Meaning that Katie Dipold would appear to be competent but boring as a writer.
…
In summary, the Haunted Mansion is an inoffensive and boring special effects comedy that really isn’t that funny. If you want to dump your preteen off while you watch Oppenheimer, you’ve got the option.”
At a budget of $150 million, the cost wasn’t completely out of control but since it only raked in $117 million this qualifies as a bomb.
7. Peter Pan and Wendy
This movie would be a lot higher on the list except it shouldn’t be here. This flaming turd was plopped on Disney+ without ceremony. However, it was supposed to be a theatrical release. Apparently, even Disney can accept reality if its harsh enough, there was no way this thing was going to justify its marketing budget let make back its production costs.
This was completely and unwatchably Woke. Every single cliche they could find in a gender studies textbook got clubbed into this thing.
“Peter Pan is a monster out of the lands of Fairy, he kidnaps children and drags them off to the last remaining realm of his kind yet untouched by the light of the White Christ. And he horribly punishes those that return to his land unbidden by him. Hook is unquestionably the unsung hero of this story as he is locked in an eternal battle with a monster in the form of a child.
So, the pirates decide to make Wendy walk the plank. Now having happy thoughts is how you can make yourself fly. So, Wendy attempts to do so. She dreams of her life to be where she will learn to fly a plane, play the piano, become an incredibly successful writer, then die alone on a couch. She will never have her proud father walk her down the aisle while a handsome young man beams at her on the happiest day of Wendy’s life. She will never know the joy of holding her child’s hand as she takes her first step. She is destined to die alone on a couch and not surrounded by grief-stricken grandchildren holding her trembling hand as she passes to the next life. No, Wendy Darling is destined to go through this world miserable, alone, and forsaken of all. The sum total of her life; a few books covered by a thick layer of dust in a library and an untended Wikipedia entry.
But then Wendy realizes that this is the perfect feminist life and overcome with joy takes flight. Wendy and Peter Pan but mostly Wendy defeat the pirates. Captain Hook falls to his death as represented by Ammit the Egyptian crocodile god-beast, the Devourer of Souls. James Hook could not even have hope for the afterlife. His was an entire life devoid of any joy or happiness because of the demon of fairy, called Peter Pan.
Wendy then sails the Jolly Roger back to the Darling house and informs her father that he will be taking care of all of the Lost Things. Mister Darling secretly laughs at his daughter’s hilarious joke and makes a mental note to see the fellow who runs the workhouse. In ten years, the Lost Boys will be joining a generation of lost boys in the trenches and the Lost Boys who are in fact Lost Girls will be reduced to London’s back alley service industries.
Horrible, yes. But wonderful in the older and darker sense of the word ‘wonder.’
This was the brilliant and daring, ultimate and penultimate subversion of a terrifying fairytale. He may be a soulless abomination, but they were all better off in Neverland with Peter Pan. So come to Disney World where you can be in Neverland too.”
Even though the budget was $170 million this one doesn’t qualify as a bomb because Disney tossed it at Disney+. It’s not really failing if you’re not really trying.
6. The Flash
This movie was easily the biggest thorn in David Zaslav’s side. Largely due to the literally insane antics of its star Ezra Miller. You could always tell when Zaslav got news of Miller’s latest scandal because the entire C-Suite could hear him screaming profanities.
Someone from his management team finally got a net over Miller long enough to explain in excruciating detail the size of the lawsuit Warner Brothers was going to hit him if he didn’t go along quietly with the men in the white coats.
It didn’t help. This thing supposedly was testing well but I don’t know why because this thing was a bad movie.
Here are some highlights from my review:
“Maybe there is an alternate universe where DC films are getting the respect they deserve. In that world, someone at Warner Brothers had the sense god gave a chicken and made a film series based on the Justice League cartoons of the 00s. In that world, there was a proper build-up for the longest and best-established superheroes in comics, Henry Cavil has had a great run as the Man of Steel, Batman is dark and engaging, Zach Snyder was never involved with DC, and Ezra Miller never left the Indie scene.
But we live in this world and here The Flash ran into a cliffside at light speed.
The superhero genre is finally out of gas, and everyone can thank Disney/Marvel for that. The market has been ludicrously oversaturated and that was just the baseline circumstance this movie was launched in.
The Snyderverse was a hideously misguided idea led by a man who wanted Batman raped in prison (that’s a quote). Snyder personally loathes heroism and mainstreamed the revolting practice of deconstructing superheroes. He really would have been a much better choice to headline The Boys rather than Justice League.
…
The tone is never right throughout this movie. There are way too many jokes for a story as dark as Flash Point is supposed to be. They were too determined to Marvel things up enough to pick a mood and stick with it. Consequently, they managed to make a worse movie than Marvel.
As I said, this thing has been Frankensteined together in the cutting room.* The story is barely coherent in any serious way. Given the ludicrous degree of knob slobbery the trade media is giving Ezra Miller’s performance I thought that it would be good but I honestly think they may as well have hired Grant Guston. Michael Keaton did deliver a good performance as Batman and is the only (and do mean only) reason I’m not giving this movie a lower rating.
The biggest problem you are going to have with a scrapbooked movie is the CG effects. CGI is a complicated process with many layers and handoffs. You only need one guy to get something wrong and everybody else is stuck polishing a turd. These things need to be planned well in advance. Since this movie was known to be getting recuts right to the last minute, the effects were not allowed to achieve minimum competence. The CG is honestly worse than Marvel’s and that’s saying something. At first, people thought Cavil wasn’t in this at all, but he was, he was just unrecognizable. It feels like someone went to the effects guys and said, “Zaslav says you’re done. There’s no more money to be had, so whatever you’ve got just render it out. We’re done here.” The results have been compared to The Scorpion King which is unfair to The Mummy Returns because that was shot twenty-two years ago, (god I’m old), it is completely unacceptable to have this expensive of a superhero movie with baby’s first effects kit doing the CG. It was awful.”
It wasn’t just bad, it was drastically overpriced. This cinematic sewage-burger officially cost Warner Brothers $300 million, (I suspect you can easily put another $50 million on top of that), plus $150-$200 million in marketing. The Flash needed to break $1 billion before it would start seeing daylight. With a box office take of $260 million, this was almost the biggest bomb of the year.
Lucky for Warner Brothers, Disney rose to the challenge.
(Continued.)
