Awfully Good: The Worst Movies of 2023

Last Updated on January 24, 2024

Yes, 2023 was a great year for cinema (though a TERRIBLE year for Hollywood, but we here at Awfully Good Movies believe you couldn’t have had the great movies without the bad ones, specifically the Top 10 Worst Movies of 2023! Last month, we held a poll for the year’s worst movies among our readers that, as always, gets tabulated against each film’s IMDb score and Tomatometer to end up with a list that represents the biggest letdowns and losers amongst our moviegoing public. Whether it was Tomlin and Fonda trying to meet Tom Brady or Adam Driver trying to shoot CGI dinosaurs, the ten nights we spent in theatres watching this crap (with the exception of watching WHITE MEN CAN’T JUMP on Hulu) were far scarier than any nights we would spend at Freddy’s. Not even the likes of Vin Diesel driving cars through explosions (again) or Jason Statham punching prehistoric sharks (again) could’ve prepared us for the likes of THE FLASH shaking our faith in superhero cinema or THE EXORCIST: BELIEVER shaking our very faith in God… and by God, I mean David Gordon Green’s ability to handle horror. And need I say any more about my previous episode on EXPEND4BLES, the dumbest movie title since FAN4STIC and the dumbest Stallone sequel since ROCKY V? But thank God for the likes of Nolan and Scorsese for renewing our faith in the cinematic experience, just as WINNIE-THE-POOH: BLOOD AND HONEY getting a theatrical release was about to have us swearing off the movie gods. And thanks to all you amazing readers and viewers for getting me to my tenth anniversary working for this website… even if it means having to sift through all these shitty movies at the end of each year.

Enjoy the video down above, followed by our text version for those of you who still like to read:

10. 80 FOR BRADY

With their Netflix sitcom GRACE & FRANKIE all wrapped up after seven seasons, the legendary Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin could now team back up on the big screen in their late 80s without having to reunite with Dolly Parton and Dabney Coleman in a retirement home set sequel to 9 TO 5. Instead, Fonda and Tomlin would pair up with two other female legends of the silver screen, Sally Field and Rita Moreno, in this true story-inspired comedy of a quartet of elderly gal pals who bond over watching Tom Brady play quarterback for the New England Patriots and win some tickets to finally see Brady play in person during his team’s legendary performance at the 2017 Super Bowl–that is, if a bunch of wacky hijinks don’t get in the way first. Sure, it may not be too far off from the kind of comedy Lemmon and Matthau did together in their final years. Still, the results feel less like a film and more like a bad sitcom episode stretched painfully thin over 90 minutes, complete with special guest star cameos from the likes of Guy Fieri, Patton Oswalt, Billy Porter, and Tom Brady himself, who in addition to co-producing this flick delivers an acting performance that won’t be putting him on the Oscar shortlist any time soon. Yet the sitcom humor bumps up uneasily against the dramatic subplots of our four leading ladies: Lily Tomlin’s cancer might be coming back! Sally Field’s marriage is falling apart! Jane Fonda’s face has been afflicted with the same deaging CGI disease as De Niro in THE IRISHMAN! And Rita Moreno has realized her being 92 years old completely invalidates the premise of the film’s title! So unless you think these esteemed female icons of film should spend their final years dancing their asses off to Lady Gaga, then let 80 FOR BRADY be retired from our memories just as Tom Brady himself is now retired from football… unless, of course, he decides to come back yet again in the distant future, to serve as the basis for the sequel BRADY IS 80!

9. 65

Adam Driver has proven in the past few years to be one of our best and most versatile actors of this generation, just as long as you don’t end up wasting him as badly as those STAR WARS sequels did. But even though Driver was done with STAR WARS, he wasn’t done with the sci-fi genre by starring in this space-travelling thriller from producer Sam Raimi and A QUIET PLACE writers Scott Beck & Bryan Woods, where he would play a pilot living 65 million years ago on a distant planet who his wife convinces to go out on a two-year space expedition so he can raise the money to save their daughter from her unnamed coughing disease, only for his spaceship to get caught in an asteroid shower and crash land on an alien planet, which actually happens to be our planet, 65 million years ago in the past! Hence the title 65! But what could have been a promising and original sci-fi adventure would end up feeling derivative of a million sci-fi movies before it, as Driver traverses the prehistoric landscape with a little girl speaking a foreign language (played by little Gamora and Ahsoka herself, Ariana Greenblatt) and faces off against the dinosaurs who are on their trail to make this feel barely different from any of the terrible JURASSIC WORLD sequels that have made this list previously. While the cinematic landscape is very much in need of some original sci-fi properties, 65’s originality as a premise is undercut by all the dramatic plot devices and green screen CGI that we’ve seen too many times, with little depth or humanity to either of the lead characters. But with Adam Driver already moving back towards prestige dramas from the likes of Michael Mann and Francis Ford Coppola, this dinosaur dud will surely be nothing more than a blip on his otherwise steady career.

8. FIVE NIGHTS AT FREDDY’S

This new year marks the 10th anniversary for the FIVE NIGHTS AT FREDDY’s franchise, which all started with the indie video game that placed the player in the role of a security guard who works the night shift at a Chuck E. Cheese’s-type family pizzeria, overseeing the cameras to make sure the secretly homicidal friendly mascots don’t escape the premises or ensnare you in their animatronic claws. It was a simple yet effective game for players of all ages as well as a boon for the Let’s Play industry on YouTube, but it wasn’t as simple to get this franchise onto the big screen after the planned Warner Bros. adaptation was transferred over to Universal and their Blumhouse Productions, with original writer and director Chris Columbus soon jumping off the project after several delays brought about by game creator Scott Cawthorn, and indie filmmaker Emma Tammi now serving as Columbus’ replacement on the final film, which has Josh Hutcherson in the role of the security guard who’s struggling to provide for his younger sister with a security job down at Freddy Fasbear’s, where he must survive the next five nights of hell ahead of him. Unfortunately, there’s a whole lot of dull padding in between those five nights, as well as the overly complicated lore behind these killer mascots that was added to the later games, which made them come off as more silly than scary. And though the PG-13 lack of gore was true to the games’ bloodless nature, it just came off as cheap even for a Blumhouse movie, with the best kill by far going to Matthew Lillard as the serial killer who’s been putting his young victims’ bodies inside these animatronic mascots, and who overacts his death like he just ate some bad Chipotle. But not only did that scene become a much-memed favorite on social media, but the movie itself blew away expectations by becoming Blumhouse’s biggest worldwide grosser of all time at the box office, in spite of the film also streaming on Peacock at the same time, so no amount of bad reviews can stop Blumhouse’s continued expertise with cheap yet profitable horror cinema… unless, of course, you’re talking about their other horror flick that came out near Halloween, but we’ll get there, folks, trust me.

7. FAST X

You would think the FAST & FURIOUS franchise would want to reset after the comparatively disappointing performance of F9 with critics and audiences, but Vin Diesel and his ever-growing family of street racers turned super spies raced on into its tenth installment, the first of three parts of the franchise’s alleged finale, but this time without longtime franchise director Justin Lin, who’d reportedly clashed on the set with Vin Diesel over his out-of-shape body and frequently forgotten dialogue to the point of shouting: “This movie is not worth my mental health!” So with TRANSPORTER and INCREDIBLE HULK’s Louis Leterrier taking his place in the director’s chair, FAST X would now have Dom Toretto and family facing off against the vengeful son of the dead villain back in FAST FIVE, Jason Momoa as Dante Reyes, who is having the time of his life going out of Aquaman mode and into a far better portrayal of the Joker than Jared Leto’s was. Sadly, Momoa is among the many names from past films, as well as such new names as Brie Larson and the guy who plays Jack Reacharound, who struggle to juggle screen time in this franchise’s increasingly swollen cast, including Jason Statham back as Deckard Shaw in one of the three films he’ll end up having on our list, John Cena as Dom’s no-longer-evil brother, and both Gal Gadot and Dwayne Johnson returning to the franchise after the collapse of the DCEU in post-credits cameos, and who will hopefully not be doing a duet together in the next film. This, unfortunately, leads to the most disjointed flick in the series to date, where all the cartoonish chaos has taken away any reality these characters used to have back in their street racing days, and none of the characters’ deaths can be taken seriously anymore when they all keep coming back from the dead anyway. As for Vin Diesel, his stoically macho persona has become far too silly for us to take seriously anymore, especially now that he’s up against Jason Momoa’s Looney Tune of a villain. So with FAST X’s production budget careening out of control to be 70% more expensive than that of F9, and the sequel coming out the same month as another big franchise follow-up that co-starred Vin Diesel, this FAST installment barely crawled into the black at the box office, far behind the pace of the previous films, leading to doubts about the next two sequels they’ve got planned, with the first set for April 2025, now that the Hollywood strikes have set back production. Only time will tell if Dom and the family can refuel this franchise before it runs out of gas for good. 

6. WHITE MEN CAN’T JUMP

In 1992, BULL DURHAM director Ron Shelton paired up the unlikely comedy duo of Wesley Snipes and Woody Harrelson in WHITE MEN CAN’T JUMP, where Wesley and Woody played a duo of streetball hustlers who overcome their racial differences to make some big money combining their skills out on the ball court. And in 2023, with Disney eager to exploit every last property it bought up from 20th Century Fox whichever way they can, we got ourselves an all-new take on this classic comedy now starring Sinqua Walls and rapper Jack Harlow in his debut role as our two interracial enemies turned friends. One is a washed-up college prodigy who threw away his career, the other is a goofy hippy who frequently injures himself out on the court. Can these two ever possibly get along? It’s just as uninspired a remake as you’d expect from a director named Calmatic who also made the terrible HOUSE PARTY remake that flamed out in theaters earlier in the year and co-writer Kenya Barris of BLACK-ISH fame, whose track record as a film writer is filled with unneeded remakes of or sequels to classic movies; COMING 2 AMERICA in particular was a big Number 2! Also uninspired was the non-existent chemistry between our two leads, with Jack Harlow in particular having the same comedy chops that Tom Brady demonstrated in 80 FOR BRADY. Hell, poor Lance Reddick in one of his last roles before his tragic death is more energetic than Jack Harlow, and he spends much of the film laid up in a hospital bed! There’s just no point in remaking a film that was so of its time like WHITE MEN CAN’T JUMP unless it has either a Rosie Perez cameo or something new to say, but this remake was instead just one of many missed shots that Disney made this past year both in theaters and on streaming, which is exactly where the new WHITE MEN CAN’T JUMP belongs. God forbid they bring these two back together for a remake of MONEY TRAIN; hell, they don’t even deserve to star in a remake of MONEY PLANE!

5. MEG 2: THE TRENCH

Back in 2018, we saw Jason Statham facing off against his biggest on-screen foe to date: a 75 foot prehistoric megalodon shark, in the adaptation of Steve Alten’s bestselling sci-fi novel THE MEG, which despite its unenthusiastic reviews was a worldwide hit that merited a sequel, since the MEG novel happens to have plenty of follow-ups itself. So for Statham’s return as Jonas Taylor, the director’s chair would now be filled by English auteur Ben Wheatley, better known for his darkly comedic indie thrillers of varying genres, with our new story focused on Statham now going back under the sea with a research team to the same trench those last few Meg sharks came from, only for the grown baby Meg they’ve got in captivity to escape out into the trench and bring back a variety of aquatic creatures who seek to induce some carnage on the surface above. Yet while the trailers emphasized these big shark attack scenes near the end of the movie, the rest of the film is padded out with a lot of flat backstory about the underwater drilling operation they’re facing off against, much of it being said in subtitled Chinese on behalf of the film’s Chinese co-producers despite Statham’s core audience of action-loving bros hating to read. And while Ben Wheatley does handle the suspense and action quite efficiently, very little of his cinematic character or wit is seen on-screen here to make this feel any different from an average CGI blockbuster. I mean, if the entire appeal of your franchise is getting to see Jason Statham kick some sharks in their goddamn faces, then just let that be most of your movie and spare us all this bullshit backstory that pads the movie out to nearly 2 hours long! You’re not making KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON, you’re making KICKERS OF THE F*CKING SHARK! So act like it! But with MEG 2 being just as globally successful at the box office as its predecessor, and Ben Wheatley saying that talks are already underway for a third MEG movie, let us hope that MEG 3 finally reaches the levels of B-movie fun that certainly weren’t reached with MEG 2. And since Martin Scorsese has produced some of Ben Wheatley’s movies in the past, maybe he can get back into acting by co-starring alongside Jason Statham in the third movie. Now that’s what I would call some goddamn cinema!

4. THE FLASH

Finally, the DC Extended Universe came to its merciful end in 2023, and the past ten years of reshoots, reboots, reedits, and behind-the-scenes drama could make for a film itself that would end up being far longer than the Snyder Cut. But no one was ready for the drama surrounding the Scarlet Speedster’s long-delayed cinematic debut from MAMA and IT director Andy Muschietti, particularly the film’s returning lead actor Ezra Miller and their love for committing crime sprees far worse than sticking a CGI baby into a microwave, which unfortunately distracted from the film’s long-awaited return of Michael Keaton in the role of Bird–I MEAN, BATMan, one of many names from past DC movies that’d pop up in this film’s loose adaptation of the infamous “Flashpoint” storyline, which involves Barry Allen running back in time with his Speed Force to try and save his mother from being killed as well as his father from being blamed for her murder, thus creating a new timeline for Barry where Batman has gone from Affleck to Keaton, Superman is now replaced by his cousin Kara, aka Supergirl, and Barry’s teenage self is acting like the TikTok addicted son of Pauly Shore. But all this multiversal nonsense only further muddied the narrative waters of the DCEU, with Ben Affleck at least trying his best in his brief return as Batman, and Sasha Calle making a great Supergirl, but Michael Keaton’s 70-year-old Batman getting little to do aside from fanbaiting with his old dialogue… and handing off his fight scenes to his clearly younger stunt double. Then that infamously bad third act comes along with a clearly unenthusiastic Michael Shannon returning as General Zod alongside some of the very worst CGI in cinema history, especially as Barry’s timeline begins crashing into other timelines from the DC Universe, resulting in ghoulish posthumous cameos from Christopher Reeve and George Reeves’ Supermen as well as Helen Slater as Supergirl and Nicolas Cage as his Kal-El from Tim Burton’s unmade SUPERMAN LIVES, with Cage himself just as baffled by his terribly rendered cameo as the audience was. Though the term “superhero fatigue” is indeed overused these days, THE FLASH demonstrates why both DC and Marvel are going through a rough patch, by emphasizing fan service and half-assed CGI over any semblance of a coherent story that could’ve end this turbulent franchise on a somewhat good note, instead of this jokey ending cameo from George Clooney returning as Bruce Wayne, with Clooney saying there aren’t enough drugs in the world for him to ever properly return to the Batsuit, seeing as Ezra Miller already took them all. How appropriate then that THE FLASH would have a crash at the box office far bigger than that of BATMAN & ROBIN, in spite of all the hype that Warner Bros. tried to build for its release, with both BLUE BEETLE and AQUAMAN AND THE LOST KINGDOM similarly facing a grim fate at the box office afterwards. And while we certainly understand that THE FLASH has some big name fans in its corner–Stephen King, Edgar Wright and Tom Cruise among them (and even our own critics Chris Bumbray and Tyler Nichols)–it’s hard to deny what an appropriately messy ending THE FLASH was for whatever the hell this DCEU was supposed to be, and we can only hope James Gunn’s new Superman movie and Andy Muschietti’s planned Batman movie will be a far better start for the new DCU, while Ezra Miller stays locked up in the deepest halls of Arkham Asylum where they belong.

3. THE EXORCIST: BELIEVER

50 years ago, THE EXORCIST opened in theaters as a blockbuster phenomenon that had audiences fleeing from the theaters in fright and being followed up by a series of occasionally good but mostly terrible sequels and prequels–one of which had to be filmed twice! But 50 years later, on the same year we sadly lost director William Friedkin at the age of 86, we got yet another follow-up to THE EXORCIST from the same trio that gave us the HALLOWEEN reboots: producer Jason Blum, co-writer Danny McBride, and director David Gordon Green, who despite their increasingly poor handling of that trilogy now sought to begin an all-new trilogy of horror sequels that would canonically ignore all the other sequels, with BELIEVER focusing on Leslie Odom Jr. as a photographer who loses his pregnant wife as well as his faith in God after an earthquake in Haiti, but whose infant daughter Angel survives to grow up into a normal teenager, until she heads out to the woods with one of her friends to communicate with her dead mom’s spirit and the two girls come back with their bodies taken over by a demon (and no, it’s not a Pazuzu this time!), thus forcing poor Dad to seek the advice of Ellen Burstyn finally returning at age 90 to the role of Chris MacNeil, who only accepted the role for a big check towards her acting scholarship, and certainly not off the strength of her godawful dialogue. Not only is Burstyn written nothing like her character from the first film, but her hyped-up role turns out to just be an extended cameo after one of the demon girls gouges her eyeballs out and sidelines her in the hospital, leaving the rest of the film to serve as an uninspired beat-for-beat remake of the first EXORCIST without any purpose of its own, at least until the final act where some priests of all faiths perform an exorcism on these girls, where it instead feels like a remake of the EXORCIST parody film REPOSSESSED! Yet even with a surprise cameo from Linda Blair back as Regan that only happens in literally the last minute of the movie, and the reshoots and reedits it underwent after poor test screenings, horror fans and film critics alike swiftly bashed the new EXORCIST, and it would quickly burn up at the box office up against Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour movie, leaving in doubt the $400 million–YES, $400 MILLION–that Universal spent on acquiring the EXORCIST rights, as the next installment of the planned trilogy DECEIVER is set to release–for now–in April 2025, and is allegedly undergoing a “creative rethink” from Blumhouse after the BELIEVER’s failure. So with William Friedkin joking before his death that his spirit would haunt David Gordon Green from the grave, Mr. Green should best get back to making indie dramas with Nicolas Cage instead of any more terrible and unneeded sequels to classic horror movies… unless, of course, he wants to bring Ellen Burstyn and Linda Blair back together once more to finally make REPOSSESSED II: THE HILARITIC!

2. EXPENDABLES 4, aka EXPEND4BLES.

What more can I say about this flick that I didn’t already say in my last video on it? The franchise that originally teamed up Sylvester Stallone and Jason Statham up in 2010 alongside a rotating crew of their fellow action stars of both past and present was back by non-popular demand nine years after the failure of EXPENDABLES 3, and its starting lineup now down to the benchwarmers for its fourth installment’s cast, with Bruce Willis tragically diagnosed with dementia, Terry Crews refusing to return after the producers tried blackmailing him to hush up his assault allegations towards Stallone’s agent, and Stallone himself returning at age 77 with no writing or producing credit since he was busy with his duelling Paramount+ shows in what was basically a glorified cameo so that Statham could take Sly’s place in leading what was the most pathetic lineup of Expendables to date. 50 Cent? Megan Fox? Andy Garcia? This sounds like an alternate universe version of the Epstein List, not a cast of action legends–aside, of course, from the great Iko Uwais and Tony Jaa. However, their action choreography is hard to appreciate amidst all the quickly cut editing, shaky camerawork, and obviously fake CGI blood that the great action movies of the 80s were never about, but which this EXPENDABLES franchise has had way too much of. How could this movie have been shown in IMAX screens alongside the likes of OPPENHEIMER when it looks like every late stage Steven Seagal movie rolled into one? And as for Stallone, of course, he doesn’t end up dying at the film’s end, but when you hear about the inexplicably horrific manner in which he took out this biker guy just for winning his ring in a thumb wrestling match, you’ll be wishing that Barney Ross had stayed dead! No wonder Jet Li nor Arnold show back up for even a cameo, while Dolph Lundgren and Randy Couture come back mostly just to stand around and wonder what even is the point anymore. So, to answer 50 Cent’s question, he posed on Instagram about his poster for the movie–”Did we run out of money?”–yes, the fourth EXPENDABLES certainly did run out of money quickly with a pathetic box office haul that barely covered half of its budget. So let’s hope this series has died that Statham can move on to hopefully better sequels such as FAST X2: X-MEN UNITED and MEG 3: MEG v MEGAN, while the Expendables finally live up to their namesake after this new low for a franchise that has never had much of a high. Let’s hope their next mission has them finally being dispatched to the retirement home! 

And now, the Number 1 Worst Movie of 2023: WINNIE THE POOH: BLOOD AND HONEY

Thanks to the dark magic that is public domain, A.A. Milne’s beloved Pooh Bear and his gang of fellow anthropomorphic stuffed animals could finally escape the shackles of their Disney prison and finally have a live action movie made about their dark and grisly origin story that A.A. Milne was too much of a pussy to put to paper, brought to you by the British indie film studio Jagged Edge Productions, which specializes in taking once innocent public domain fairy tales and turning them into horrific reimaginings. And with the first Pooh book entering public domain in the US in 2022, the Jagged Edge crew decided to do the same with poor little Pooh Bear, who in this horror adaptation gets left behind by Christopher Robin now that he’s going off to college, forcing the Hundred Acre Wood gang to starve and turn feral on each other. Five years pass, and Christopher Robin comes back from college with his fiancee to find that the surviving Pooh and Piglet have become distorted life-size monsters who stalk the Hundred Acre Wood to kill whoever comes next in their sight brutally. This was so badly received by certain fans of the Pooh franchise that director Rhys Frake-Waterfield claims that he and his crew have gotten death threats and petitions to stop their sullying of this once-innocent beacon of childhood innocence. Yet once the movie itself finally came out and all the Internet headlines had died down, BLOOD AND HONEY is nothing more than another run-of-the-mill slasher flick, where the said slasher happens to be an awful-looking rendition of Winnie the Pooh. Once the shock value goes away, there’s nothing left other than a direct-to-video horror cheapie that’s no better in quality than any Tubi original movie out there, aside from laughing occasionally at the actor playing Christopher Robin taking this movie just as seriously as Ewan McGregor took this role in that live-action Disney movie. Yet with the movie’s Internet buzz leading to the flick getting an American theatrical release that helped it make back far more than its $500,000 budget, disappointed audiences and critics who have stopped laughing at this joke of a premise will be saddened to hear that BLOOD AND HONEY 2 is hitting theaters next month as we speak, with the esteemed Shakespearean co-star of the STREET FIGHTER movie and ACE VENTURA 2, Simon Callow, joining up the no-name cast, and the character of Tigger now getting a horrific reimagining that looks like a werewolf who escaped from prison. I’m sure that sequel can’t be any worse than what JoBlo readers have helped us determine to be a very deserving choice for the worst movie of 2023. As for me, I’ll stick with the live-action Pooh special that Disney made in the late 80s, TOO SMART FOR STRANGERS, because a terribly costumed Pooh Bear singing to your kids about the horrors of being sexually abused by strange adults is far scarier than any horror film could be!

And there you have them, our top 10 picks for the worst movies of 2023, as helped by the amazing readers of JoBlo.com. I’m Jesse Shade for JoBlo.com, and thank you again for watching our show. If you like what you see, please subscribe to the JoBlo Originals channel; tell all your friends who like this sort of content, and turn on the bell to receive notifications for all our latest videos. We are an independent company that appreciates all of your support, and now that 2024 has marked my 10th anniversary as a YouTube critic, I’m now going to go off and crawl into a pile of dust.