Modern Movie Slop

Hollywood has always made bad films. What is 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 rather than for being worth watching. The films on this list are not merely bad. They are instructive in their specific failures: each one demonstrates a distinct way that contemporary studio filmmaking goes wrong, from franchise exhaustion to prestige self-indulgence to the reheating of properties that nobody requested.

Each entry includes a craft note for writers — because the specific failure modes of these films are exactly the failure modes that fiction writers encounter when they lose the thread of what they are actually trying to do. Bad Hollywood films are not just entertaining disasters. They are detailed case studies in craft failure.

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1. 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, which is 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 is not a complaint about quality — it is the fundamental problem. 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 did not lose money on paper. It also did not need to exist.

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2. Thor: Love and Thunder (2022)

Taika Waititi’s Thor: Ragnarok was genuinely excellent — it took a dead franchise, injected genuine wit and visual invention, and produced the best Thor film by considerable distance. Love and Thunder demonstrates 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 lands because all of it is performing Waititi rather than being Waititi.

Christian Bale’s Gorr the God Butcher is genuinely 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 did not want to use. The MCU machine had identified what made Ragnarok successful, quantified it, and requested more of it — which is exactly how you destroy the thing you identified.

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3. 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 demonstrates what happens when a star’s desire to play a character replaces the question of whether there is 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, rather than giving him an interesting arc.

The Justice Society of America is introduced, 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 genuinely charismatic in this role. There is no movie around him. Warner Bros. shelved the character almost immediately after release. Ten years of negotiation for a film that was deactivated within six months.

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

The Ant-Man films worked as small-scale heist comedies. The first two were genuinely charming precisely 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, a 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 essentially zero.

MODOK — the giant floating head villain from the comics, a genuinely ridiculous character that could work in the right register — is played for comedy in a film that is simultaneously trying to establish Kang as the MCU’s next Thanos-level threat. The tonal incoherence is not accidental. It is the result of a film trying to be both an Ant-Man movie and a franchise-building Kang introduction simultaneously and succeeding at neither.

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5. 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 is not unwatchable — DaCosta directs the body-swapping sequences with genuine 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 has not 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)

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 rather than through anything the film has earned. It is a mausoleum dressed as a movie. The audience is invited to cry not because the story has built toward this moment but 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 actually is: the inheritance of someone else’s creative work, maintained out of love and commercial necessity, and ultimately incapable of producing anything new because the thing it loves is the past.

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7. Jurassic World Dominion (2022)

Jurassic World Dominion is a film about dinosaurs that is also significantly about locusts. The primary plot involves genetically engineered giant locusts destroying the world’s food supply, which is a problem that has absolutely 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 did not 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)

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 specific 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, which sounds trivial, but the mustache is Sully. He’s the mustache.

The film made $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 specific quality. Audiences want adventure. They will accept this adventure. A better version would still have made money and would also have been good.

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9. 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 rather than the audience. Morbius exists not because anyone wanted a Morbius film but 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, demonstrating that ironic appreciation does not translate to actual attendance. The film is remembered entirely for a meme it did not generate intentionally. This is not the relationship with the audience that $75 million is supposed to buy.

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10. 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 does not 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 do not compensate for a story that is 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 genuine characters and genuine wit alongside the spectacle. Moonfall has neither. The images are big. Nothing in them matters.

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11. 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 is simultaneously overstuffed and inert.

The specific failure of Amsterdam is instructive: the talent is genuine, 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)

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 genuinely extraordinary. Brad Pitt is doing exactly what the role requires. The film around them does not know what it is arguing about Hollywood, about the cost of ambition, or about what the transition to sound actually meant. It knows it feels something intense about its subject. Feeling is not argument.

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13. 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, which is the film’s central metaphor, which the film would like you to notice is 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 are wrong.

Network — the correct comparison — worked because Chayefsky understood the mechanisms of the thing he was satirizing: how television’s logic produces specific behaviors, specific incentives, specific failures. Don’t Look Up does not understand its targets. It simply disapproves of them, loudly, with a cast of extremely famous people making faces. Disapproval is not satire. Satire requires understanding what you are 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)

Austin Butler is genuinely 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 specific quality of a film that is more interested in being felt than in being understood. The film does not want you to think about Elvis. It wants you to be overwhelmed by Elvis, which is a different and lesser aspiration.

Tom Hanks’s Colonel Tom Parker, the narrator, is the film’s structural excuse for avoiding genuine engagement with its subject — everything is filtered through Parker’s self-serving account, which 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.

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15. 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 has 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 had not developed.

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16. 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 specific quality of someone who has studied visual references extensively and understood none of them as arguments rather than aesthetics.

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 genuine storytelling. The images are often beautiful. They do not add up to anything because Snyder’s directorial intelligence is entirely visual and entirely disconnected from narrative. Rebel Moon looks like a film that has something to say. Nothing is being said.

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

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

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18. Fast X (2023)

The Fast & Furious franchise began as a film about street racing in Los Angeles. By Fast X it involves a giant bomb being rolled through Rome by a car driven by Vin Diesel’s son 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 actually dead, and a cliffhanger ending designed to establish two more films. The franchise escalated itself past the point where any individual entry can be evaluated as a film — it is 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 is nowhere left to go that is not space, and they have already done space.

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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 actually 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 decision was motivated by the desire to have a “point of entry” character for audience members unfamiliar with the games. 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 did not show up anyway. The genuine 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)

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 the new Snow White would not be defined by a love story, and the subsequent 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 a single frame was publicly screened.

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

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

Disney’s live action remake program is the most instructive institutional failure in contemporary cinema because it is not a creative failure — it is a philosophical one. The program begins from a premise that cannot 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 are animated — the unreality of the medium is load-bearing. The Lion King’s live action CGI remake is visually stunning and emotionally inert because realistic lions do not 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 genuinely 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 — not because it produces films worth making. That the program makes money is the most depressing fact about it. The audience has been telling Disney for fifteen years that it will pay for mediocre versions of things it loves.

The collective failure can be stated 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 that should have been asked creatively.

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 is supposed to be and has no idea what it is trying to say.

The good news for fiction writers is that most of these forces do not apply to you. You are not protecting a $4 billion IP acquisition. You do not have a star’s contractual requirements to satisfy. Your release date is not 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?

What Did We Miss?

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