There’s a special kind of dread that sets in when you realize a film you’ve been anticipating might actually be terrible. Sometimes it’s a clunky line of dialogue, a baffling creative choice, or an unconvincing CGI sequence that sets off the alarm bells. Sometimes it’s everything, and the film itself seems designed to be as off-putting and alienating as cinematically possible.
With this in mind, this list discusses those movies that underwhelm from the beginning, offering next to nothing in their opening acts and only going downhill from there. From misguided cinematic experiments to misfiring franchise revivals, here are ten films that announced their awfulness almost immediately, cementing their status as trainwrecks of the big screen with infamous legacies.
‘Cats’ (2019)
“The Jellicle Ball has begun.” Cats is one of the most infamous dumpster fires of the last decade, and its problems are apparent from the get-go. The opening number tries to dazzle with a flurry of CGI-enhanced fur, jittery camera work, and a song that’s supposed to introduce the world. None of it works. By the time the first wide shot shows an entire alley full of human-faced cats slinking and hopping like caffeinated nightmares, all hope for the movie is lost.
Where to begin? The tone is immediately disorienting, the weird, choppy visual effects break the immersion (the original theatrical release even included some glitches, like cats having the wrong number of fingers), the info dump of exposition kills the momentum, there’s no emotional anchor to ground the narrative, and the music often feels disconnected from the visuals. The scale also shifts inexplicably. Milk bottles tower like skyscrapers in one shot, then look normal in the next. Just a mess all around.
‘Dolittle’ (2020)
“We have no choice but to embark on this journey.” A talking dragonfly voiced by Jason Mantzoukas doesn’t sound like the worst possible idea for a children’s movie, but Dolittle manages to make even its supposedly whimsical elements feel exhausting almost immediately. The movie starts with an animated origin story sequence for Dolittle (Robert Downey Jr.), before cutting to live-action in the present day, with the doctor living as a recluse but forced to reenter society to prevent the loss of the manor where he lives with his animals.
The tone of these sequences is all over the place, whiplashing from fantastical children’s animation to live-action melancholy and slapstick animal humor. The jokes fall flat, the exposition is heavy-handed, and many of the CGI animals look unconvincing (though nowhere near the nightmare fuel that is Cats). Not to mention, we get Downey Jr.’s “Welsh-ish” accent, and it’s clear (painfully so) that no one told him to tone it down.
‘Moonfall’ (2022)
“The moon is out of orbit.” Moonfall opens with a prologue where a trio of astronauts on a satellite is attacked by a swarm of alien technology. NASA dismisses the incident, after which we flash forward ten years; one of the astronauts is now a high-ranking official, and there are claims that the moon is shifting dangerously close to Earth. In other words, these first 10 minutes try to do a lot at once: establish past trauma, introduce a cosmic threat, and set up a conspiracy-laden sci-fi disaster plot.
But in doing so, Moonfall sacrifices emotional depth and character development. There’s a sense of desperation in the way it tries to hook you immediately (mystery! explosions! science jargon!), but it only underscores how thin the premise is. Moonfall doesn’t get better as it rolls along. Indeed, Neil deGrasse Tyson says it violates more laws of physics per minute than any other sci-fi movie.
‘Terminator: Dark Fate’ (2019)
“My name is Dani Ramos.” The beginning of Terminator: Dark Fate contains one of the most controversial story beats of the 2010s. After a recap of Terminator 2: Judgment Day, we get a scene set in 1998. Sarah (Linda Hamilton) and a teenage John (a digitally de-aged Edward Furlong) are relaxing at a beach bar somewhere. Suddenly, a T-800 walks up to them. Sarah barely has time to realize what’s happening before the Terminator pulls out a shotgun, shoots John dead, and walks away. The whole sequence lasts less than a minute.
We then jump to a “new” future, where Skynet no longer exists, but a different AI named Legion is in power. From here, the plot zeroes in on a new protagonist, a new Terminator, and a new protector. The rest of the movie is fine, but many people hated the prologue. After all, it undoes the emotional resolution of T2 and makes the characters’ victories from the earlier movies meaningless.
‘The Fanatic’ (2019)
“Moose is in the house.” The Fanatic begins with a cliched, noirish voice-over, then introduces us to John Travolta (sporting a questionable haircut and an even more questionable accent) as autistic street performer and cinephile Moose. Travolta’s performance caught a lot of flak, with many finding it to be stilted, caricatured, and even exploitative. Plus, these opening sequences are an awkward hodgepodge of genres and tones.
It’s hard to know how you’re mean to feel about what you’re seeing, like the movie is trying to be a psychological thriller, quirky indie comedy, character drama, social commentary, and dark satire all at the same time. The writing is shaky and amateurish, and the aesthetics fare little better. The Fanatic looks cheap and dated, with clunky editing, flat lighting, TV-movie camerawork, and an ill-fitting soundtrack. By the time you reach the end, you really wonder what the point of this was.
‘Madame Web’ (2024)
“The future is always in motion.” One of the biggest superhero bombs in recent memory, Madame Web makes Morbius look like The Dark Knight. The opening sequence is essentially the protagonist’s origin story: while responding to an emergency, paramedic Cassie (Dakota Johnson) falls into water, has a near-death experience, is revived, and gains clairvoyant powers. This setup feels like a corporate checklist of genre tropes rather than natural storytelling.
The scenes are uninspired, weighed down by shaky dialogue and a low-energy performance from Dakota Johnson. The early attempts at “mystery” are undercut by clumsy foreshadowing that practically announces every twist before it lands. The issues only snowball from here, including tepid action scenes, brazen product placement, a plodding plot, Britney Spears needle drops, and characters frequently explaining in great detail what they’re doing. But worst of all, Madame Web is simply boring, the cardinal sin a superhero movie can never commit.
‘The Snowman’ (2017)
“Mr. Police, you could have saved her.” Few films announce their incompetence as quickly as The Snowman. In the first 10 minutes, it serves up a grim flashback sequence involving a boy and his mother being abused by the boy’s father. They flee in a car across a frozen lake, but fall through the ice; the boy survives, but the woman drowns. Cut to the present day, where detective Harry Hole (Michael Fassbender) is passed out on a playground bench. His character is thus a walking noir cliche, the brilliant but alcoholic investigator with a tragic past.
Much of the rest of the story is borderline incomprehensible, probably due to production problems. Ultimately, the director couldn’t shoot about 10 to 15% of the screenplay, so they had to rejigger the narrative in editing, to decidedly mixed results. Unsurprisingly, The Snowman was a critical and commercial flop that quickly earned infamy as one of the worst movies of the 2010s. The only compelling mystery in it is how Fassbender signed on to such a dud.
‘Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny’ (2023)
“I miss the desert. I miss the sea.” Returning to a beloved franchise is always a challenge because fan expectations tend to be sky-high, but Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny was more disappointing than your average legacy sequel, failing to recapture the magic of the early Indy movies. A case in point is the opening sequence, a flashback featuring a high-speed train chase, which should be a classic, exhilarating Indiana Jones setpiece.
Instead, it’s thoroughly underwhelming, thanks to awkward de-aging effects on Harrison Ford and CGI-heavy visuals that lack that sense of tactile danger that made the earlier films’ stunts so iconic. Basically, this prologue contains all the movie’s flaws in microcosm: a surfeit of exposition, weightless action, chaotic editing, lame MacGuffins, and a general failure to channel that true Indiana Jones spirit fans were craving. We want charm, grit, and authenticity, not computer-generated slickness.
‘Serenity’ (2019)
“Baker Dill, you’re in my net.” On paper, Serenity looked lit should have been solid: a juicy premise, a noirish aesthetic, a good director in Steven Knight, Anne Hathaway and Matthew McConaughey at the helm, Djimon Hounsou and Jeremy Strong supporting. But within minutes, you know you’re in for a stinker. In the opening, McConaughey’s fishing boat captain broods endlessly and yells at fish before receiving an offer from his ex-wife to murder her new husband.
The dialogue in these scenes is clumsy and overwritten, with characters speaking in metaphor-heavy nonsense. Plus, the pacing feels slightly “off,” as if scenes are rushed or missing beats. Weirder still, the movie hits us with a bizarre sci-fi twist some time later, completely changing the dynamic. This concept could’ve been cool if it had been handled well, but it’s not; instead, it just comes off as ridiculous. No wonder this movie lost money at the box office.
‘House of the Dead’ (2003)
“We’re here for the rave.” House of the Dead is a video game adaptation directed by Uwe Boll, so you knew going in that it was going to be atrocious, but even then, the beginning is truly trash. It features a bleak, monotonous voice-over, a supposedly epic island party that the movie clearly didn’t have the budget to pull off, then the rapid introduction of several lifeless, cardboard cutout characters, more partying, and shots of an ominous creature rising in a dark cave.
It’s meant to be scary, but winds up being unintentionally funny thanks to poor lighting and cheap effects. This downward trajectory continues for the rest of the movie’s 90-minute runtime, which somehow feels overlong despite being so brief. For all these reasons, House of the Dead is frequently ranked among Boll’s absolute weakest works, which is to say it’s one of the worst films of all time.
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