Modern Movie Slop

Hollywood has always made bad films. What’s specific to the current era is the industrialization of badness: the systematic production of expensive, technically accomplished, aggressively mediocre content at scale, optimized for brand protection and IP maintenance with no thought to being worth watching. The films on this list are instructive in their failures: each one shows a distinct way that contemporary studio filmmaking goes wrong, from franchise exhaustion to prestige self-indulgence to the reheating of properties that nobody requested.

I want a movie to surprise me, and these films treat that wish as a nuisance. The waste is the worst of it. Somebody had a studio’s fortune and a crew of gifted craftspeople, and they spent it all on a product meeting’s idea of a story. A cheap bad movie I can forgive. An expensive one made by people who obviously knew better feels like contempt for the audience.

Each entry includes a craft note for writers, because the failure modes of these films are exactly the failure modes that fiction writers encounter when they lose the thread of what they’re trying to do. Bad Hollywood films are detailed case studies in craft failure.

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1. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023)

► Read the full review of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023)

The film opens with a de-aged Harrison Ford that looks like a video game cutscene from 2019, the exact quality of uncanny wrongness you want to establish in the first three minutes of your $295 million legacy sequel. What follows is a reasonably competent adventure film connected to nothing the original trilogy built emotionally or thematically, featuring a time travel ending that sends Indiana Jones to ancient Syracuse, a resolution so aggressively unearned that Indy himself cries at having to come back to the present.

Nobody needed this film. That’s the fundamental problem, and it’s nothing to do with quality. The original trilogy ended on Raiders, built a mythology across three films, and left Indiana Jones in exactly the right place. Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was already unnecessary. Dial of Destiny is the sequel to the unnecessary sequel, existing solely because Disney paid $4 billion for Lucasfilm and needed to generate product from the investment. The film didn’t lose money on paper. It also didn’t need to exist.

This one made me sad before I reached the insult. Indiana Jones meant something, and Disney wrung one more product out of him because the accounting demanded it. The de-aged opening looks dreadful to me, and the time travel ending is where I gave up on the film completely. I’d much prefer the character had been left alone where the trilogy put him.

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2. Thor: Love and Thunder (2022)

► Read the full review of Thor: Love and Thunder (2022)

Taika Waititi’s Thor: Ragnarok was excellent. It took a dead franchise, injected real wit and visual invention, and produced the best Thor film by considerable distance. Love and Thunder shows what happens when a director’s specific sensibility is identified, extracted, and reapplied without the constraints that made the original work. The jokes are louder, the colors are brighter, the goats scream more, the emotion is broader, and none of it works because all of it is performing Waititi instead of being Waititi.

Christian Bale’s Gorr the God Butcher is frightening in his brief scenes and is given approximately fifteen minutes of screen time in a two-hour film, because the film is more interested in screaming goats. Bale reportedly prepared extensively for a role the film didn’t want to use. The MCU machine had identified what made Ragnarok successful, quantified it, and requested more of it, and that’s how you destroy the thing you identified.

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3. Black Adam (2022)

► Read the full review of Black Adam (2022)

Dwayne Johnson spent approximately ten years ensuring Black Adam got made, personally negotiating the character’s inclusion in the DCEU, and the result is a film that shows what happens when a star’s desire to play a character replaces the question of whether there’s a story worth telling about that character. Black Adam is a powerful, ancient Egyptian anti-hero who kills people indiscriminately. The film’s job is to make the audience root for him. Its solution is to make everyone around him less interesting than he is, instead of giving him an interesting arc.

It introduces the Justice Society of America, which fights Black Adam, then teams up with Black Adam, then fights alongside Black Adam, accomplishing nothing in the process. The Rock is physically imposing and charismatic in this role. There’s no movie around him. Warner Bros. shelved the character almost immediately after release. Ten years of negotiation for a film Warner Bros. deactivated within six months.

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4. Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (2023)

► Read the full review of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (2023)

The Ant-Man films worked as small-scale heist comedies. The first two were charming because they were modest, a thief with a shrinking suit, a family comedy dressed as a superhero film. Quantumania takes that charming small-scale character and deposits him in the Quantum Realm, an entirely CGI environment with no tactile reality, to fight Kang the Conqueror, a multiversal villain whose stakes are cosmically enormous and whose impact on Scott Lang’s specific story is effectively zero.

MODOK (the giant floating head villain from the comics, a ridiculous character that could work in the right tone) is played for comedy in a film that’s at the same time trying to establish Kang as the MCU’s next Thanos-level threat. The tonal incoherence is the result of a film trying to be both an Ant-Man movie and a franchise-building Kang introduction and succeeding at neither.

I gave Quantumania a score below zero on purpose, because zero felt too kind. It took the most likable hero Marvel had and dumped him into a CGI void so a studio could audition its next big villain. MODOK made me wince. Every minute spent on Kang felt like homework for a movie I’ll never care about.

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5. The Marvels (2023)

► Read the full review of The Marvels (2023)

To understand The Marvels you need to have watched Captain Marvel, WandaVision, Ms. Marvel, and Secret Invasion. This is approximately twenty hours of prerequisite viewing for a two-hour film. The film itself isn’t unwatchable (DaCosta directs the body-swapping sequences with real invention, and the three leads have real chemistry) but the studio’s assumption that audiences had completed the homework was incorrect. The $206 million box office, against a $220 million budget, is the market’s answer to the homework assignment.

The MCU’s peak (Infinity War, Endgame) worked because they were the culmination of a decade of investment the audience had freely chosen to make. The post-Endgame MCU assumes the same level of investment for content that hasn’t earned it. The Marvels is a reasonable film that arrived after too many unreasonable demands on the audience’s time and patience.

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6. Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021)

► Read the full review of Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021)

Ghostbusters: Afterlife ends with the digital ghost of Harold Ramis (Egon Spengler, dead in 2014) interacting with the living cast in a sequence designed to produce emotional response through the manipulation of grief instead of through anything the film has earned. It’s a mausoleum dressed as a movie. The audience is invited to cry because a beloved actor is dead and the film is using the fact of his death as its climax.

The film around this ending is a Stranger Things-inflected small-town adventure with a child protagonist, competently made, entirely unnecessary. Jason Reitman directing his father’s franchise and ending it with a digital resurrection of a dead comedian is the most revealing image of what contemporary IP filmmaking is: the inheritance of someone else’s creative work, maintained out of love and commercial necessity, and incapable of producing anything new because the thing it loves is the past.

I gave up on the film for good at that ending. The kids and the small town are pleasant enough, and Reitman clearly cares about the material, but using a dead actor’s face to squeeze tears out of me feels ghoulish. Ramis earned that affection with his own work, and I resent a film that spends it without earning any of its own.

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7. Jurassic World Dominion (2022)

► Read the full review of Jurassic World Dominion (2022)

Jurassic World Dominion is a film about dinosaurs that’s also significantly about locusts. The primary plot involves genetically engineered giant locusts destroying the world’s food supply. That’s a problem that’s nothing to do with dinosaurs. The dinosaurs are present, and occasionally they appear during the locust plot, and occasionally the locust plot pauses so that a dinosaur can chase someone, and then the locust plot resumes. The original cast (Sam Neill, Laura Dern, Jeff Goldblum) is returned for reasons that serve neither the new trilogy nor the original.

Jurassic Park worked because Spielberg understood that the premise (dinosaurs exist and are terrifying) required nothing else. Every addition since has attempted to complicate a premise that didn’t need complication. By Dominion the franchise had so thoroughly buried its own premise under corporate conspiracy plots that the dinosaurs had become ambient decoration in their own film.

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8. Uncharted (2022)

► Read the full review of Uncharted (2022)

The Uncharted games work because Nathan Drake is a fully developed, witty, physically credible character whose relationship with his mentor Sully is the emotional engine across four games. Tom Holland’s Nathan Drake is twenty-five and inexperienced, which eliminates the quality that makes the character appealing, the seasoned, improvisational confidence of someone who has done this a hundred times and still barely survives.

Mark Wahlberg’s Sully has no mustache for most of the film. That sounds trivial, but the mustache is Sully. He’s the mustache.

Box office came to $401 million and a sequel is in development. This tells you something about the gap between commercial success and quality, and also something about the global market’s appetite for adventure content regardless of its quality. Audiences want adventure. They’ll accept this adventure. A better version would still have made money and would also have been good.

The mustache joke makes me laugh, and the complaint behind it is serious. Drake and Sully are the reason anyone cares about those games, and the film bent both characters to fit its stars. The sloppy part is how little effort it would’ve taken to get this right, with an audience already primed to show up.

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9. Morbius (2022)

► Read the full review of Morbius (2022)

Sony’s Spider-Man Universe (Venom, Morbius, Madame Web, Kraven) is the most instructive example of IP-driven studio strategy producing films that serve the strategy instead of the audience.

Nobody wanted a Morbius film. Morbius exists because Sony owns the Spider-Man adjacent characters and needs to produce content to maintain the licensing rights. The film is the legal document dressed as entertainment. Jared Leto gives a committed performance in a film with no reason to exist.

The internet’s brief ironic embrace of Morbius (“It’s Morbin’ Time,” the meme that was significantly more entertaining than the film) produced a brief theatrical re-release that grossed $300,000 on its opening weekend, showing that ironic appreciation doesn’t translate to actual attendance. The film is remembered entirely for a meme it didn’t generate intentionally. This isn’t the relationship with the audience that $75 million is supposed to buy.

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10. Moonfall (2022)

► Read the full review of Moonfall (2022)

Roland Emmerich has been destroying the Earth in increasingly elaborate ways since 1996, and Moonfall represents his most ambitious thesis: the Moon is a hollow megastructure built by ancient humans, contains an AI that wants to destroy humanity, and is falling toward Earth. The film’s internal logic doesn’t survive contact with any individual scene’s physics, but internal logic has never been Emmerich’s concern. His concern is the image (the tidal wave against the highway, the moon filling the sky) and in Moonfall those images don’t compensate for a story that’s actively ridiculous.

The $67 million box office against a $140 million budget suggests that the audience for Emmerich’s specific brand of cheerful catastrophism has finally found the limit of its patience. Independence Day worked because it had real characters and real wit alongside the spectacle. Moonfall has neither. The images are big. Nothing in them matters.

I’m fond of dumb disaster movies, and Moonfall still exhausted my patience. A hollow moon with an evil AI inside could’ve been gloriously silly fun if anyone in it had seemed like a person. Instead I sat there watching expensive rubble and waiting for a reason to care who survived.

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11. Amsterdam (2022)

► Read the full review of Amsterdam (2022)

Amsterdam is the most spectacular commercial failure of the era: $80 million budget, $6.4 million domestic box office, a cast including Christian Bale, Margot Robbie, John David Washington, Robert De Niro, Taylor Swift, Rami Malek, Anya Taylor-Joy, Mike Myers, and Michael Shannon, and no discernible audience for any of it. David O. Russell assembled the most expensive cast that money could buy and produced a film about a 1930s conspiracy involving American fascism that’s both overstuffed and inert.

Amsterdam’s failure is instructive: the talent is real, the subject is interesting, the period is well-rendered, and nothing works because the story has no shape. Characters arrive, deliver dialogue, leave. Plot points accumulate without building toward anything. The conspiracy is revealed and the revelation produces no feeling. A cast of this quality should guarantee something. What it guarantees here is that very expensive people were in the room when very little happened.

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12. Babylon (2022)

► Read the full review of Babylon (2022)

Damien Chazelle’s film about the transition from silent to sound film opens with an elephant defecating on a man, contains a rattlesnake scene, a syphilis scene, a scene in a sewer, and approximately forty minutes of orgiastic excess intended to communicate that Old Hollywood was decadent and exciting. The film is three hours and nine minutes long. It earns perhaps ninety minutes of that running time.

The rest is Chazelle confusing the depiction of excess with the communication of meaning, if the film is loud and long and extreme enough, perhaps the audience will mistake the volume for profundity.

Margot Robbie is extraordinary. Brad Pitt is doing exactly what the role requires. The film around them doesn’t know what it’s arguing about Hollywood, about the cost of ambition, or about what the transition to sound meant. It knows it feels something intense about its subject. Feeling isn’t argument.

I’m torn on Babylon. There are stretches of it I’d happily watch again, and Robbie is magnetic whenever she’s on screen. Then Chazelle piles on another bodily fluid and another half hour, and my patience runs out. It frustrates me more than anything else on this list because a great ninety-minute movie is buried inside it.

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13. Don’t Look Up (2021)

► Read the full review of Don’t Look Up (2021)

Adam McKay’s satire of media, politics, and climate denial is exactly as subtle as a comet hitting the Earth, the film’s central metaphor, and the film would like you to notice it’s a metaphor. Every character is labeled (this one represents media superficiality, this one represents tech billionaire delusion, this one represents political cowardice) and then performs their label at maximum volume for two and a half hours. The film is confident that its targets are wrong, correct that its targets are wrong, and completely uninterested in understanding why they’re wrong.

Network, the correct comparison, worked because Chayefsky understood the mechanisms of the thing he was satirizing: how television’s logic produces particular behaviors, incentives, and failures. Don’t Look Up doesn’t understand its targets. It simply disapproves of them, loudly, with a cast of extremely famous people making faces. Disapproval isn’t satire. Satire requires understanding what you’re attacking well enough to find the specific, accurate detail that makes the attack land. Don’t Look Up finds the general and amplifies it.

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14. Elvis (2022)

► Read the full review of Elvis (2022)

Austin Butler is extraordinary as Elvis Presley, a physical and vocal transformation of the first order, a performance that deserved a better film around it. What it got instead was Baz Luhrmann’s direction, which approaches every scene with the visual grammar of a perfume advertisement: rapid cuts, swirling camera, contemporary music mixed with period music, the feel of a film that’s more interested in being felt than in being understood. The film doesn’t want you to think about Elvis.

It wants Elvis to overwhelm you, a different and lesser aspiration.

Tom Hanks’s Colonel Tom Parker, the narrator, is the film’s structural excuse for avoiding real engagement with its subject. The film filters everything through Parker’s self-serving account. That means the film can avoid committing to an argument about who Elvis was and what his story means. The frame that was designed to provide perspective instead provides evasion.

I’m torn on Elvis. Butler is so good that I kept wanting the camera to slow down and let me watch him work, and Luhrmann won’t allow it. I finished it admiring a performance and irritated by the movie wrapped around it, and that tug of war is exactly why it’s in the middle of my scale.

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15. The Gray Man (2022)

► Read the full review of The Gray Man (2022)

The Russo Brothers directed two of the highest-grossing films in history with Infinity War and Endgame, then made The Gray Man for Netflix at $200 million and produced a film so thoroughly generic that it became a meme for forgettability within weeks of release.

Ryan Gosling is charismatic. Chris Evans is having fun as the villain. The action sequences are competent. The story is indistinguishable from approximately forty other spy action films released in the previous decade. Two hundred million dollars of absolute median.

The Gray Man is the clearest demonstration of what happens when talented filmmakers work without the constraints that produced their best work. Infinity War’s achievement was managing twenty-plus characters and multiple storylines within the constraints of a franchise that had spent ten years establishing them. The Gray Man has no constraints. It’s no franchise, no established characters, no pre-existing emotional investment. It needed to build those things from scratch, and it turned out that building them from scratch was the skill the Russos hadn’t developed.

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16. Rebel Moon (2023)

► Read the full review of Rebel Moon (2023)

Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon began as a Star Wars pitch that Lucasfilm declined, and the decision to decline it is one of the cleaner pieces of creative judgment in recent Hollywood history. Snyder took his pitch, reconstituted it as an original property, and produced two films in which Seven Samurai is performed with slow-motion photography, desaturated color grading, and the air of someone who has studied visual references extensively and understood them as aesthetics and none of them as arguments.

The films contain characters, settings, and conflicts drawn from sources that Snyder clearly loves (Star Wars, Kurosawa, Sergio Leone) assembled without the connective tissue of real storytelling. The images are often beautiful. They don’t add up to anything because Snyder’s directorial intelligence is entirely visual and entirely disconnected from narrative. Rebel Moon looks like a film that’s something to say. Nothing is being said.

Rebel Moon insults the films it borrows from. Seven Samurai is about people, and Snyder turned it into a mood board. I can forgive a filmmaker for failing. What I can’t forgive is taking something as humane as Kurosawa and draining the humanity out of it for the sake of slow motion.

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17. Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom (2023)

► Read the full review of Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom (2023)

The Lost Kingdom is the final film of the Snyderverse DCEU and was released after Warner Bros. had already announced the James Gunn reboot. Meaning the film arrived in theaters as an officially dead franchise’s final entry, with audiences fully aware that nothing in it would matter to any future DC film.

Reportedly, it was recut multiple times, had Amber Heard’s role considerably reduced following the Depp-Heard trial, had reshoots to include a post-credits scene that was later removed, and arrived in theaters having been through so many versions that nobody, including probably the filmmakers, knew what it was trying to be.

Lost Kingdom made $127 million against a $205 million budget. The DCEU is over. Lost Kingdom’s failure isn’t creative but institutional: a film killed by the decisions made around it before it was released.

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18. Fast X (2023)

► Read the full review of Fast X (2023)

The Fast & Furious franchise began as a film about street racing in Los Angeles. By Fast X it involves Vin Diesel’s son driving a car that rolls a giant bomb through Rome while Jason Momoa’s villain camps at the camera, a space station, the return of multiple characters from previous films who either survived their deaths or were never dead, and a cliffhanger ending designed to establish two more films. The franchise escalated itself past the point where anyone can evaluate an individual entry as a film.

It’s now a delivery mechanism for the next entry.

The $704 million box office suggests the franchise still has commercial life. The $340 million budget suggests the escalation is approaching the point of diminishing returns. The family drives a bomb down the Vatican steps. There’s nowhere left to go that’s not space, and they’ve already done space.

Fast X is where my patience with this franchise finally ran out. When the stakes are a bomb rolling down the Vatican steps, nothing can surprise me anymore and nobody feels in danger. The cliffhanger annoyed me most, an ending that exists only to sell me the next ticket.

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19. Mortal Kombat (2021)

The Mortal Kombat games have twenty-plus beloved, iconic characters with decades of backstory and fan investment. The film’s solution was to invent a new character (Cole Young, a cage fighter with no personality and a dragon birthmark) and have him be the protagonist, while all of the characters the audience came to see appear in supporting roles. Cole’s function is to be inferior to everyone he meets, learn things the audience already knows, and eventually unlock his power in the third act.

The desire to have a “point of entry” character for audience members unfamiliar with the games motivated the decision. This is a legitimate creative consideration that produced an illegitimate result: the character designed to bring in new audiences alienated the existing fans, and the new audiences didn’t show up anyway. The real characters (Sub-Zero, Scorpion, Kano) are more interesting in every scene they inhabit than the invented protagonist in any scene he inhabits.

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20. Snow White (2025)

► Read the full review of Snow White (2025)

Disney’s Snow White remake arrived in theaters carrying more pre-release baggage than any film in recent memory.

Rachel Zegler’s public comments dismissing the original 1937 film as a story about a girl waiting for a man, her statements that a love story wouldn’t define the new Snow White, and the later revelation that the film still has a love story, just a different one, combined with the production’s CGI dwarfs controversy (replacing the seven dwarfs with a digitally created diverse group of “magical creatures”) to produce a film that had antagonized its potential audience before Disney publicly screened a single frame.

Zegler’s performance reviews were mixed. The film’s critical reception was poor. The box office was catastrophic relative to budget. The failure mode is the complete inability of anyone involved in the production to understand that publicly dismissing the beloved source material isn’t a marketing strategy. The audience for Snow White came to see Snow White. They were told that Snow White wasn’t worth making the way Snow White was made. They stayed home.

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21. Every Disney Live Action Remake (2010-Present)

► Read the full review of Every Disney Live Action Remake (2010-Present)

Disney’s live action remake program is the most instructive institutional failure in contemporary cinema because it’s not a creative failure.

It’s a philosophical one. The program begins from a premise that can’t produce good films: take an animated film that worked, and make it again, with real people (or CGI animals that look like real people), without changing anything significant enough to justify the existence of the new version. The animated originals work because they’re animated. The unreality of the medium is essential.

The Lion King’s live action CGI remake is visually gorgeous and emotionally inert because realistic lions don’t express emotion, and the original’s emotional power comes entirely from the expressive animation.

The one partial exception is The Jungle Book (2016), in which Favreau’s photorealistic environments and voice acting produced something impressive. Every other entry in the program ranges from adequate (Cinderella, 2015) to catastrophic (Snow White, 2025, covered above). The program exists because it makes money: Beauty and the Beast grossed $1.26 billion. That the program makes money is the most depressing fact about it. The audience has been telling Disney for fifteen years that it’ll pay for mediocre versions of things it loves.

I can state the collective failure simply: none of these films needed to exist. Not one of them asked “what can live action do that animation cannot?” which is the only question that justifies the remake. Instead they asked “how closely can we reproduce the animated original in a way that the audience will pay to see again?” The answer turned out to be “very closely” and “quite a lot,” which is a commercial answer to a question they should have asked creatively.

This is the entry that stings most for me, because I care about those animated films and Disney keeps selling them back to us with the life scraped out. The Jungle Book is the one I’d defend. The rest feel like photocopies made by a company that stopped asking whether it had anything to add, and the box office keeps telling it that it doesn’t need to.

What These Films Share

The twenty-one entries here fail in different specific ways, but the underlying failure is consistent: in each case, something other than the story was driving the decisions. Brand maintenance, star vehicles, franchise obligations, IP licensing requirements, demographic anxiety, release date pressures, marketing campaigns run ahead of the creative work. All of these are real forces in contemporary studio filmmaking, and all of them produce the same result when they override the creative work: a film that knows what it’s supposed to be and has no idea what it’s trying to say.

Most of these forces don’t apply to you if you write fiction. You’re not protecting a $4 billion IP acquisition. You don’t have a star’s contractual requirements to satisfy. Your release date isn’t driven by a theme park opening. You can ask the question that none of these films adequately asked: does this story need to exist, and if so, why?

The studios behind these films had every advantage a storyteller could want, and they wasted those advantages on product. Nobody in those rooms seemed willing to ask why the story needed telling, and I blame the executives for building a system where people treat that question as an obstacle to the release date.

What modern film belongs on this list?

There’s more slop where this came from. Drop your nominations in the comments, especially if you think we were too hard on anything here. That would be a very difficult case to make.