The Best Movie Substack's Five Worst Films of 2024
Honorable Mention: Every other movie released in 2024!
Considering the extent to which media coverage of the film industry—not to mention film criticism!—is now preoccupied with the business side of moviemaking, with box office returns and CEO salaries; with the palace intrigue surrounding studio mergers and acquisitions; with the rise and fall of streaming service stock prices; original programming budgets; and subscriber engagement metrics, it is curious how rarely the financial opportunity cost of producing a truly rat shit movie gets talked about.
In other words: Is it possible to argue that the $450 million it cost to make and market Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023) could have been better spent elsewhere, on literally anything else? (Some examples: firearms, cigarettes, a live-action remake of Fantasia.) Alternately, if the Walt Disney corporation had piled its Indiana Jones sequel slush fund in a giant pyramid and set it ablaze, and 81-year-old Harrison Ford had gone to a golf course in Palm Springs instead of a green screen set in Atlanta, would anyone except for those involved in the production be worse off? Would the cultural landscape not be a little less blighted? Or can we rest easy knowing that, despite the gross wastefulness that Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny represents, the army of tax accountants at Disney were still able to write off the loss? …no harm done?
In total, the five films on the list below cost a reported $422 million to make, and that exorbitant figure doesn’t include their marketing, distribution, and advertising budgets. Factoring those post-production expenses in, their aggregate cost is probably more around $650 million. Given their quality, that may read as a pathologically wasteful amount of money, but that doesn’t mean that yesterday’s trash can’t become today’s treasure: Perhaps this Substack listicle will be so good that those hundreds of millions of squandered dollars will look, in retrospect, like a more than justified expense. Here are the five worst films of 2024:
The Best Movie Substack’s Five Worst Films of 2024
The Fifth-Worst Film of 2024: Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
Directed by George Miller. Estimated budget: $168 million.
125 Words on Why Furiosa Sucks: Like his octogenarian contemporaries Ridley Scott and Woody Allen, George Miller is harnessing his half-century-plus of industry capital to bury his professional reputation before the gravediggers can throw the dirt on his corpse. A directionless, structureless slog that has minimal interest in its title character and maximum interest in her hammy antagonist (Chris Hemsworth), Furiosa mostly exists to mine the nostalgia associated with its superior predecessor, Mad Max: Fury Road. While that film may have been short on subtext, its kinetic action and formal bravura illustrated how material strife and resource lack can strip humans, good and evil, of their humanity. Furiosa is the kind of bad that makes you wonder: Was Fury Road so celebrated because it invited its audience not to think?
The Fourth-Worst Film of 2024: Nightbitch
Directed by Marielle Heller. Estimated budget: $25 million.
125 Words on Why Nightbitch Sucks: As ham-fisted and inadvertently laughable as this adaptation may be, there are foundational problems in the conceit of its source novel, which sets a metaphorical transformation of a mother into an animal in what is, comparatively, a much less primal phase of motherhood. (Blame the four years that elapsed and made the book’s pity-the-white-woman politics feel dated, or Rachel Yoder’s workshop cohort for failing her during her MFA.) Instead of an unflinching look at the strange, physically transformative wonders of pregnancy, birth, and breastfeeding, the film instead explores a much more static and cerebral period of being a mother. The flashbacks to Nightbitch’s Mennonite childhood are completely a-contextual, and no one in the movie acknowledges the fact that Amy Adams is 50.
The Third-Worst Film of 2024: Joker: Folie a Deux
Directed by Todd Philips. Estimated budget: $200 million
125 Words on Why Joker 2 Sucks: How does the production of a movie that transpires almost entirely in a mental asylum and a courtroom balloon to a budget of $200 million? Answering that question begins with understanding that the sequel to Joker isn’t a movie—it’s a pump-and-dump shitcoin scam perpetrated by Todd Philips and Jaoquin Phoenix. Neither an entertaining musical nor an intellectually coherent anti-musical, Joker: Folie a Deux imbues its predecessor with an import that can only be described as delusional, and in the process accomplishes what that innocuous film’s most strident critics were so worried about: It disarms dangerous incels, telling a story so boring and lazy that they will turn their assault rifles on themselves before carrying out the next mass shooting.
The Second-Worst Film of 2024: Babes
Directed by Pamela Adlon. Estimated budget: $4 million.
125 Words on Why Babes Sucks: The premise of Babes, written by the hetero-queer power couple of Ilana Glazer and Josh Rabinowitz, can trigger a nervous breakdown on its own: A fuckup yoga instructor meets a magical black man on the train, they have a one-night stand, and when she discovers that she is pregnant with his child, she learns that he choked to death weeks earlier on a nut. Like Nightbitch, Babes sells itself on championing womanhood and motherhood, while making every woman involved look like a talentless incompetent. What remains is a deeply perverse liberal fantasy in which a bourgeois white woman acquires the ultimate accessory—a mixed-race baby—and then is free to raise it in a Brooklyn purged by gentrification of poor people and other races. Nuts!
The Worst Film of 2024: Emilia Perez
Directed by Jacques Audiard. Estimated budget: $25 million
125 words on Why Emilia Perez Sucks: A thousand racist transphobes typing on a thousand typewriters for a thousand years could not produce a movie idea as baffling, unnerving, and cryptically retrograde as Emilia Perez. The racism and transphobia, of course, stand outside the movie, and serious critics should concentrate their energies on how the film’s structure undermines the storytelling, the absent-of-melody songwriting, the undeveloped supporting characters, how the whole thing is lit like an out-of-business laser tag. The only logical explanation for Emilia Perez existing is that Netflix has an experimental psychological warfare division. Having released a handful of okay movies that fell short during awards season, the corporation has created a horrible new weapon, a movie whose stupidity reads as genius to Oscar voters, and rank psychosis to everyone else.
😂 👏 😂
hetero-queer power couple 😭