Top Ten Worst films of 2023 (Part Two)
While this was a terrible year for American movie studios (Angel Studios excepted in a big way), it was unquestionably the worst year ever in the history of the century-old Walt Disney Studios.
Every. Single. Thing. Lost. Money.
Yes, I’m including Guardians of the Galaxy Volume III. Given how things work these days a Disney film with a budget of $250 million has to make at least $1 billion before it’s comfortably in the black. A big part of that is the destruction of the secondary and tertiary income streams due to the creation of Disney+. Also, there is a lot of major expenses that aren’t covered by the budget, marketing costs are almost dollar for dollar of the budget, although this isn’t necessarily the case with Disney movies because their budgets are so freaking insane.
It has been reliably estimated that Disney Studios lost well over a billion dollars in 2023. In a competently run corporation visitors to Disney’s C-suite should be wading through the spilled blood of executives. However, there have been almost no changes at all in the leadership of Walt Disney Studios, Marvel, or Lucasfilm. Well, Dave Filoni was promoted after his TV show failed come to think of it, that is technically a change.
In this year of the All Bad, I was honestly hard-pressed to decide which one of these disasters was truly the worst.
5. Antman and the Wasp Quantumania
It says so much about Antman 3 that its biggest direct competitor was fucking Cocaine Bear.
Movie ticket prices have risen 30% since the last Antman movie was launched and the raw, unadjusted was significantly lower than the second Antman movie. Toy sales were non-existent unless you count the gag gifts that were picked up for a buck or two at Ollie’s.
“Nineteen Eighties Mexican sword and sandals videos had more respect for the people that would be seeing them than this flick did. There are no characters, only cut-and-paste caricatures. This is no plot, only a series of ridiculous contrivances. This entire motion picture has been built around appearance for the sake of appearance. It is a Disney Frankenstein. This film is broken. Like its namesake, there is no substance to Quantomania at all.
Marvel jokes are shotgunned randomly all over this flick. No matter what the circumstances or the stakes, or what the tone of a scene happens to be there were jokes flying in to shatter the tenor of the moment. None of which were funny. I was honestly startled when someone in the audience laughed at one of the jokes.
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This was the movie that made it clear that the vast majority of teenage girls in the new Marvelverse would be just as smart as Tony Stark.
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There was no part of this movie worth seeing. The plot if you can call it that is just one contrivance after another whose only purpose was to get to the next contrivance. The jokes were unfunny and inappropriate. MODOK got a redemption arc because Cassie called him a dick, so MODOK heroically dies defeating Kang (sorry should have thrown that in the list), and his death scene is making fun of him as he checks out.
This thing was killed by studio notes. It was obviously and repeatedly thrown down the editing room garbage disposal, fished out of the sewage line, slapped back together again, and sent out for more audience testing. It is utterly unwatchable. It is without question the worst Marvel movie ever made.”
I wrote that last line before I saw The Marvels.
Inept script, incomprehensible story, bastardized comic book characters (poor MODOK), and effects that would get you fired off the Corridor Crew have become reliable staples of Marvel movies. If you want to put Marvel’s collective dysfunction in a nutshell this phrase sums it up: They legitimately thought Antman 3 was a really good move.
4. The Little Mermaid
This was the real black swan that landed on the Disney brand. Strange World they could write off as a failed new franchise but Little Mermaid was a live-action remake and failure of one of those strikes at the heart of Disney’s longest-standing business strategy: The Vault.
The Vault has changed form over the years. At first, it was theatrical re-releases of classics that would be cycled into the cinemas once every seven years or so. Disney would stress in its marketing that this would be the last chance to see, let’s say, 101 Dalmatians for seven years, an unimaginable length of time for an 8-year-old who would then beg a groaning mom and dad to take him or again before it was “too late.”
Videotape killed that model, which set off a panic until one of the executives that work for Mickey the Great and Terrible figured out that videotape wears out, especially if it’s watched constantly day in and day out which kids are very likely to do. The Disney Vault was alive again.
The DVD bubble was the glory days of the Disney Vault. It was damn near printing money, (I’ll have to see if Reedy Creek tried to do that too), and it opened the door for cheap and mostly (although not all) bad direct-to-DVD sequels.
But then the DVD bubble burst.
What to do? Well, there were already plans in place for Disney’s own streaming service but that was going to take a few years to set up. So, in the meantime, they decided to try a live-action remake with a classic property. They tried two different tacks. Maleficent grossed more than Cinderella but it was at a much higher budget, the latter had a much better ROI. But both made bank.
The Vault lived.
Until now. The DIE tumor had metastasized before this went into production.
If Disney Studios was making Cinderella today, she would have ended the movie having slapped Prince Charming for being a stalker, then as a single, empowered woman, who had made her stepmother realize that her treatment of Cinderella was just acting out against Patriarchal oppression, started a home business with all of the women in her family making glass shoes.
The heart of the Little Mermaid was a romance and it is fundamentally impossible for feminist company to make one of those. All of the charm of the original cartoon was deftly extracted. Trying to follow that plot but with the complete ablation of Aerial trying to find love with Eric created nothing but another gaudy, Woke mess that no little girl in her right mind would want to see.
And the new music sucked. Lin Manuel Miranda cannot adjust his style to fit in with another composer’s work. He just can’t do it.
The final damage was a take of $568 million against a budget of $300+ meaning this is another one that needed to get over $ 900 million if it was going to win the race and instead broke its legs getting out the gate.
3. Wish
Mickey the Franchise Cancer Rodent’s once bulletproof brand is now lying facedown in the gutter. There is no longer any question about that unless you are a Disney executive.
This film was supposed to be the pinnacle of Disney’s 100th-year celebration. It was meant to be a reminder of how great Disney animation can be.
Instead, it forcibly reminded everyone of what Disney is no longer capable of:
“The day Walt Disney put the first scenes from Sleeping Beauty into production, he told sequence director Eric Larson, “What we want out of this is a moving illustration. I don’t care how long it takes.” He actually meant something more specific: A moving illustration designed by painter Eyvind Earle. In one meeting, he said, “For years and years I have been hiring artists like Mary Blair to design the styling of a feature, and by the time the picture is finished, there is hardly a trace of the original styling left. This time Eyvind Earle is styling Sleeping Beauty, and that’s the way it’s going to be!”
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“60 years after its premiere, Sleeping Beauty stands as a landmark in animation history for its singular designs and animation. The new generation of artists working at Disney, Pixar, and other studios cite Sleeping Beauty as an influence and an inspiration. Oscar-winning Pixar director Pete Docter says, ‘Eyvind Earle made great choices in the backgrounds. Most of the photos I took of the South American jungle for Up are just a mess. You can’t really tell what’s foreground and what’s background. Something we referenced from Earle’s work is how light defines where detail is. Where a streak of light crosses a tree, you’ll suddenly see this ornate bark; further up, where the trunk is in shadow, there’s less detail.’
And now we get this:
Disney animated movies are now being shown in other countries with warning labels on the front of theaters advising families that “The values represented in this film do not remotely align with that of our country.”
This like every film this year was something Disney filmmakers created just for themselves and not at all for their audience.
With a production budget of $250 million and a box office gross of $145 million when a humiliated Disney Company stopped reporting income for it, Wish is the worst bomb in the history of Disney animated films.
The only reason this movie didn’t land at number 1, was the scale of the disasters from our next two entries.
2. The Marvels
I am aware that I’ve been using the words “worst disaster in the history of…” A little too frequently in this list but I’m afraid it has been unavoidable. But this unquestionably is the biggest flop in the history of Disney/Marvel films.
It couldn’t break $200 million, even the mathematically illiterate Disney shills were forced to this one cratered so hard it cracked the Earth’s core.
“I’ve made so many Frankenstein jokes about Disney/Marvel/Star Wars movie scrapbooking. I indeed and truly am out of material when it comes to this new one. That said The Marvels is only utterly incomprehensible if you try to pay attention to it. Let the Kenworth truck-size potholes and continuity errors go by unremarked upon by your conscientious mind, and you will only be dealing with catastrophic boredom.
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This movie was hacked into another dimension in the cutting room. All Marvel films are scrapbooked to death these days but this one was a special case. It is like watching a fever dream. You will see Kamala in her Ms Marvel costume in a scene, then the camera cuts away and when it comes back she’s in street clothes. This is in the same scene. Kamala gets the second bangle and then in the next scene, it’s gone again with no explanation. There is even a scene where Kamala uses her powers after she has lost her bangle. But then she gets both and loses one again. Look you have to accept a certain degree of “fill in the blanks yourself” when you are watching a superhero movie. I accept that but what I will not accept is having to fill in such a vast amount of plotholes that it looks like the result of a WWII carpet bombing run. That is not my job as an audience member, even in a Marvel movie.
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Also, the costuming is nothing short of hideous. This was a $300 million plus movie with Babylon 5-level props and costumes but not storytelling and plot coherence. This thing looked dirt cheap. Since I know it wasn’t, this means that Marvel has had it’s key talent links in costuming and set design broken. Nobody halfway decent will work for them anymore.”
That is indeed and truly Disney’s biggest problem now. The glamour has been broken, and the talent has figured out that the bullshit you will have to suffer from Devil Mouse isn’t remotely worth the “prestige” of working on a Marvel or especially a LucasFilm movie.
And speaking of Lucasfilm, number one with a bullet on this list of suck is…
1. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny
In a terrible year for movies and up against some tough competition from its own studio, this film shone through as the worst of the worst.
Disney was given several signs and portents from on high about how bad this movie would be. It was under a curse. Aside from the usual LucasFilm Story Group cluster fuck development process of terrible ideas married to ludicrous budgets, and a legendary director that walked off the project, the star of the film had a shoulder injury that required months to recover from after about $150 million had already been spent.
Everybody keeps praising Bob Chapek but he screwed up a lot and not strangling this monster in its cradle may well have merited his firing. When Ford was laid up, Chapek could have simply killed the production, collected the insurance money, and made sad noises about what might have been. Proceeding with the project meant that the budget would be automatically doubled because of the time delay while Ford recovered.
Maybe if they thought this was something great it would have been one thing but how the hell did anybody think that?
“Writing 101, never use time travel. Not unless you are incredibly smart and autistically detail-oriented. If it’s a one-way trip, you might get away with it but otherwise, every midwit on Earth is going to spot the paradoxes you accidentally set up. LucasFilm does not employ any writer that smart. Worse still this thing clearly and obviously went through the Disney scrapbooking process of editing excellence through data-driven audience feedback. A time travel story written by retards and the choose-your-own-adventure Disney editing “process” resulted in complete narrative incoherence. Exactly what I was expecting it to be. The new LucasFilm never disappoints.
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With an inhuman effort of will I’m going to attempt to be fair to Phoebe Waller-Bridge. She really isn’t the Destroyer of Franchises, she’s way too clueless for that. It’s the women producers who hire her (and look like her) that destroy the franchises. She’s just a symptom of a fatal disease and not the cause of it. That said no fan is ever happy to see her because any franchise that she’s in is about to get a feminist keel hauling.
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Indiana Jones well and truly gets the Jake Skywalker treatment. Helena is suddenly better than him at everything, constantly runs him down, and gives Ford every excuse to wear his befuddled old man face as he is amazed by the glory that is Helena Shaw. Indiana is now her comic relief sidekick.
They go to Morocco, but they are pursued by Voller who uses Nazi magic to floo flame himself and his goons back into the movie whenever it needed an action beat. I’m not kidding, there is no attempt at all to explain how the Nazis suddenly found Helena and her idiot old man sidekick whenever the plot needed them to. I can accept that kind of disconnect once in a movie, like when the U-boat caught up with Indy and Marion out of the blue in Raiders, it didn’t break the movie but this does because it happens constantly.
Oh, and Helena has her own Moroccan Short Round. When she says, “When I first met him, he tried to pick my pocket.” I thought for just a second that Indy would reply, “Hey, I knew a kid like that!” Or anything at all that directly acknowledged the fan favorite beloved character. But no. Indy doesn’t mention his little ball cap-wearing buddy at all. The incompetent makers of Indy V are just straight-up ripping off Short Round’s origin story and hoping the audience won’t notice.
Say what you like about Short Round but he wasn’t an absurd Mary Sue. He had limitations due to his size. Moroccan Round on the other hand is a magic ethnic. You name it, he can do it, to include flying a Cessna with no training at all. Seriously, the kid does a Rey Palpatine and flies solo because he’s just that good. Do the women that run LucasFilm honestly think that flying is easier than driving a car? It’s not ladies, and gentlemen who identify as ladies of LucasFilm, it really is not
Admittedly, the bad guys are pretty magical too.
Skipping ahead to the ending because nothing that happens in this film matters.
The steampunk time machine is a one-way ticket to the Roman siege of Syracuse. Archimedes invented a time machine to try and get someone from the future to solve the Greeks’ problem. Helena, her sidekicks, and the Nazis all fly back in time. Making Voller’s plan crap from the start, I’m sure James Mangold sympathized.
You can tell Doomcock was right about the original ending. They were clearly leading up to Indy dying. He got shot in the chest and was getting worse throughout the entire third act. Except for those scenes where he miraculously rallied and could punch Nazis again. Believe it or not, this was the GOOD version of the movie.
The one that tested the best.”
This cinematic Lusitania was repeatedly torpedoed by its own studio.
When Disney premiered this monster at Cannes they didn’t insist on a review embargo and the European critics eviscerated it. It had terrible reviews hanging over it for three weeks before Disney’s American shills could be properly mobilized.
Disney said the budget was “approximately” $300 million but I’ve heard high-end estimates of as much as half a billion dollars (not including astronomical marketing costs). That was against a box office take of $381 million. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is quite possibly the worst financial failure in the history of the motion picture.
Anyone who both loved LucasFilm movies and knew how Disney reflexively does business began Mourning for the Lost when the sale was first announced. It was always going to be bad, even when talented people were willing to work for the House that Bob Wrecked, it still would have been bad. Disney would have to Disneyify it, the franchise would have its DNA mutated until it could enter Disney’s genetic stew. Anything that made it truly special would extracted, and existing characters would be warped to fit in or replaced by new ones so Disney wouldn’t have to pay the original creators.
What most people couldn’t see was just how bad it would be when the Grasshopper People that Bob Iger hired would invade the nests of productive people and start devouring everything in the name of DIE (Diversity, Inclusivity, and Equity).
How Disney keeps making such terrible films is quite easy to explain. Everyone who had a clue what they were doing is long gone. The ones that replaced them are so untalented and incompetent that they honestly don’t know good from bad.
Okay, I’m done here.
