No matter how often people repeat the old mantra that quality trumps quantity, Hollywood remains insistent: Actually, quantity is better.
2025 showed the limits of that strategy. Yes, some of the year’s big movies delivered their required doses of excitement and humor. James Gunn’s Superman was a fresh new take on the oldest comic-book superhero. Of course, James Cameron once again bombarded moviegoers’ eyeballs with intergalactic spectacle, this time with Avatar: Fire and Ash. And if you want to call Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another a blockbuster — and its budget certainly places it in the blockbuster category — then there wasn’t a better movie period in 2025 than a blockbuster.
But in movies as in life, bigger is not always better. And in 2025 a lot of the bigger movies were not only not better, they were substandard. Like, really, really stinky and bad. Awful even! Today we are ranking the ten worst blockbusters of 2025 from the vaguely tolerable to the ones that should get buried in that landfill in New Mexico where they dumped all the unsold copies of E.T. for Atari.
It must be noted here that the term “blockbuster” originally meant a massive financial hit; the sort of movie that drew lines around the block. But let’s face it: No one lines up for movies anymore, and some of the biggest movies never play in theaters in 2025. So I’m instead going to define “blockbuster” here more in terms of sheer size and ambition. These were the films that aspired, financially if not creatively, to a certain level of scope and budgetary excess.
Again, we’re looking at those only films that landed on the wrong side of the quality over quantity divide. These ten films had quantity for days. Quality? Not so much.
The Worst Blockbusters of 2025
Blockbusters had a spotty track record in 2025. Some were great; some were … the movies on this list.
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