2023 featured a lot of bad films, and the box office results showed it in a lot of cases. Disney’s failure was just part of the problem of some of these top ten worst films of 2023.
I have never had trouble finding material for a list like this before, but this year, the term “embarrassment of riches” doesn’t come close to describing the unscalable mountain of bad that Hollywood built this year.
In fact, Disney could have swept this entire list if it wasn’t for a big last-minute push by Warner Brothers. There are several factors that went into these choices when ranking this list: budget versus financial failure, bad writing, notable technical incompetence, plus my own preferences and bigotries.
I should probably include a film by Paramount just to remind people that the studio still exists (for the moment anyway). So I’ll start with them.
10. Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One.
This is the best film on this list. This isn’t really all that bad of a movie. Ethan Hunt’s latest adventure only made the list for a couple of reasons.
First, there were some serious technical deficiencies that were evident with the final cut. These were brought on by the restrictions Covid imposed on the film crew.
Second, this may actually have beaten Disney in terms of blown budget. One executive who was overly excited before the film launched, mentioned that they had spent $600 million on this film. I am assuming that this included the parts of Dead Reckoning Part Two that were filmed concurrently. If it only was for Part One, then they were completely batshit insane. There was no way in hell this movie was going to break $1.5 billion, which was what it would have needed to recoup budget plus marketing.
It also had a very unexpected problem. The Sound of Freedom ate its lunch, it had a worldwide take of $250 million and landed Angel Studios in the top ten money makers of 2023, leaving all of Tinsel Town with a “who farted” look on its face. Sound of Freedom has the exact same demographic as Mission Impossible. This is a problem for Tom Cruise because no one else in Hollywood caters to Generation X anymore.
The other problem was Oppenheimer. Dead Reckoning was locked out of the IMAX screens after its first week, that is a huge amount of premium ticket sales lost.
9. Elemental
This is the best of worst for Disney. The story wasn’t as woke as I’ve come expect from Disney but that said, it was romance between a strong woman and her simp. At a $200 -$250 million budget, this one could have made bank if it had had a typical John Lasseter-sized opening weekend. But it didn’t. The opening domestic take was $29 million. That killed any chance for it to make a profit and it didn’t.
8. The Haunted Mansion
I actually gave this one a semi-positive review (2.5/5), this equates to: If it comes on while you laying on the couch and don’t want to be bothered to change the channel, you may as well give it a chance.
Here’s what I had to say about it at the Arkhaven Blog:
“Here’s the thing about this movie, I didn’t hate it. The plot was contrived in several places but it is a ghost story. Ben and Travis had identifiable plot arcs. Nobody else did but that was okay.
The plot wasn’t Woke at all, in some ways it was fairly old-fashioned. The joke I made the other day about a 1970s movie starring Kurt Russel and Leslie Ann Warren? Yeah, this really could have been that movie. The romantic pairing wasn’t cross-racial for once, and frankly, a black couple makes more sense in New Orleans. There are no forced and awkward LGBTQ insertions. They don’t even bring up slavery in New Orleans. There is the possibility that a lot of those things were there and were cut at the last minute. Regardless, I have no ideological objection to this film. It will be a fine Halloween movie.
A fine, boring Halloween movie.
That is my only real objection here. This thing is just plain dull, I never laughed once. I was never particularly scared either but no one ever is scared by special effects horror/comedies. It had all of the baseline problems that Ghostbusters (2016) had, but it didn’t have Paul Fieg and the cast making them worse. Meaning that Katie Dipold would appear to be competent but boring as a writer.
In summary, the Haunted Mansion is an inoffensive and boring special effects comedy that really isn’t that funny. If you want to dump your preteen off while you watch Oppenheimer, you’ve got the option.”
At a budget of $150 million, the cost wasn’t completely out of control but since it only raked in $117 million this qualifies as a bomb.
7. Peter Pan and Wendy
This movie would be a lot higher on the list, except it shouldn’t be here. This flaming turd was plopped on Disney+ without ceremony. However, it was supposed to be a theatrical release. Apparently, even Disney can accept reality if it’s harsh enough. There was no way this thing was going to justify its marketing budget, let alone make back its production costs.
This was completely and unwatchably Woke. The only reason I watched it at all was that I hadn’t slept for a couple of days because of a torn-up back, and that night I was half-gorked on pain meds. I wrote this review as if I was being enlightened by its progressivism.
Every single cliche they could find in a gender studies textbook got clubbed into this thing.
“Peter Pan is a monster out of the lands of Fairy, he kidnaps children and drags them off to the last remaining realm of his kind yet untouched by the light of Christ. And he horribly punishes those that return to his land unbidden by him. Hook is unquestionably the unsung hero of this story as he is locked in an eternal battle with a monster in the form of a child.
So, the pirates decide to make Wendy walk the plank. Now having happy thoughts is how you can make yourself fly. So, Wendy attempts to do so. She dreams of her life to be where she will learn to fly a plane, play the piano, become an incredibly successful writer, then die alone on a couch. She will never have her proud father walk her down the aisle while a handsome young man beams at her on the happiest day of Wendy’s life. She will never know the joy of holding her child’s hand as she takes her first step. She is destined to die alone on a couch and not surrounded by grief-stricken grandchildren holding her trembling hand as she passes to the next life. No, Wendy Darling is destined to go through this world miserable, alone, and forsaken of all. The sum total of her life; a few books covered by a thick layer of dust in a library and an untended Wikipedia entry.
But then Wendy realizes that this is the perfect feminist life and overcome with joy takes flight. Wendy and Peter Pan but mostly Wendy defeat the pirates. Captain Hook falls to his death as represented by Ammit the Egyptian crocodile god-beast, the Devourer of Souls. James Hook could not even have hope for the afterlife. His was an entire life devoid of any joy or happiness because of the demon of fairy, called Peter Pan.
Wendy then sails the Jolly Roger back to the Darling house and informs her father that he will be taking care of all of the Lost Things. Mister Darling secretly laughs at his daughter’s hilarious joke and makes a mental note to see the fellow who runs the workhouse. In ten years, the Lost Boys will be joining a generation of lost boys in the trenches and the Lost Boys who are in fact Lost Girls will be reduced to London’s back alley service industries.
Horrible, yes. But wonderful in the older and darker sense of the word ‘wonder.’
This was the brilliant and daring, ultimate and penultimate subversion of a terrifying fairytale. He may be a soulless abomination, but they were all better off in Neverland with Peter Pan. So come to Disney World where you can be in Neverland too.”
Even though the budget was $170 million this one doesn’t qualify as a bomb because Disney tossed it at Disney+. You’re not really failing if you’re not really trying.
6. The Flash
This movie was easily the biggest thorn in David Zaslav’s side. Largely due to the literally insane antics of its star Ezra Miller. You could always tell when Zaslav got news of Miller’s latest scandal because the entire C-Suite could hear him screaming profanities.
Someone from his management team finally got a net over Miller long enough to explain in excruciating detail the size of the lawsuit Warner Brothers was going to hit him with if he didn’t go along quietly with the nice men in the white coats.
It didn’t help. This thing supposedly was testing well but I don’t know why because this thing was a bad movie.
Here are some highlights from my review:
“Maybe there is an alternate universe where DC films are getting the respect they deserve. In that world, someone at Warner Brothers had the sense god gave a chicken and made a film series based on the Justice League cartoons of the 00s. In that world, there was a proper build-up for the longest and best-established superheroes in comics, Henry Cavil has had a great run as the Man of Steel, Batman is dark and engaging, Zach Snyder was never involved with DC, and Ezra Miller never left the Indie scene.
But we live in this world and here The Flash ran into a cliffside at light speed.
The superhero genre is finally out of gas, and everyone can thank Disney/Marvel for that. The market has been ludicrously oversaturated and that was just the baseline circumstance this movie was launched in.
The Snyderverse was a hideously misguided idea led by a man who wanted Batman raped in prison (that’s a quote). Snyder personally loathes heroism and mainstreamed the revolting practice of deconstructing superheroes. He really would have been a much better choice to headline The Boys rather than Justice League.
The tone is never right throughout this movie. There are way too many jokes for a story as dark as Flash Point is supposed to be. They were too determined to Marvel things up enough to pick a mood and stick with it. Consequently, they managed to make a worse movie than Marvel.
As I said, this thing has been Frankensteined together in the cutting room. The story is barely coherent in any serious way. Given the ludicrous degree of knob slobbery the trade media is giving Ezra Miller’s performance I thought that it would be good but I honestly think they may as well have hired Grant Guston. Michael Keaton did deliver a good performance as Batman and is the only (and do mean only) reason I’m not giving this movie a lower rating.
The biggest problem you are going to have with a scrapbooked movie is the CG effects. CGI is a complicated process with many layers and handoffs. You only need one guy to get something wrong and everybody else is stuck polishing a turd. These things need to be planned well in advance. Since this movie was known to be getting recuts right to the last minute, the effects were not allowed to achieve minimum competence. The CG is honestly worse than Marvel’s and that’s saying something. At first, people thought Cavil wasn’t in this at all, but he was, he was just unrecognizable. It feels like someone went to the effects guys and said, “Zaslav says you’re done. There’s no more money to be had, so whatever you’ve got just render it out. We’re done here.” The results have been compared to The Scorpion King which is unfair to The Mummy Returns because that was shot twenty-two years ago, (god I’m old), it is completely unacceptable to have this expensive of a superhero movie with baby’s first effects kit doing the CG. It was awful.”
It wasn’t just bad, it was drastically overpriced. This cinematic sewage-burger officially cost Warner Brothers $300 million, (I suspect you can easily put at least $50 million on top of that), plus $150-$200 million in marketing. The Flash needed to break $1 billion before it would start seeing daylight. With a box office take of $260 million, this was almost the biggest bomb of the year.
Lucky for Warner Brothers, Disney rose to the challenge.
While this was a terrible year for American movie studios (Angel Studios excepted in a big way), it was unquestionably the worst year ever in the history of the century-old Walt Disney Studios. Every movie lost money.
Yes, I’m including Guardians of the Galaxy Volume III. Given how things work these days a Disney film with a budget of $250 million has to make at least $1 billion before it’s comfortably in the black. A big part of that is the destruction of the secondary and tertiary income streams due to the creation of Disney+. Also, there is a lot of major expenses that aren’t covered by the budget, marketing costs are almost dollar for dollar of the budget, although this isn’t necessarily the case with Disney movies because their budgets are so freaking insane.
It has been reliably estimated that Disney Studios lost well over a billion dollars in 2023. In a competently run corporation visitors to Disney’s C-suite should be wading through the spilled blood of executives. However, there have been almost no changes at all in the leadership of Walt Disney Studios, Marvel, or Lucasfilm. Well, Dave Filoni was promoted after his TV show failed come to think of it, that is technically a change.
In this year of the All Bad, I was honestly hard-pressed to decide which one of these last five disasters was truly the worst.
5. Antman and the Wasp Quantumania
It says so much about Antman 3 that its biggest direct competitor was fucking Cocaine Bear.
Movie ticket prices have risen 30% since the last Antman movie was launched and the raw, unadjusted was significantly lower than the second Antman movie. Toy sales were non-existent unless you count the gag gifts that were picked up for a buck or two at Ollie’s.
“Nineteen Eighties Mexican sword and sandals videos had more respect for the people that would be seeing them than this flick did. There are no characters, only cut-and-paste caricatures. This is no plot, only a series of ridiculous contrivances. This entire motion picture has been built around appearance for the sake of appearance. It is a Disney Frankenstein. This film is broken. Like its namesake, there is no substance to Quantomania at all.
Marvel jokes are shotgunned randomly all over this flick. No matter what the circumstances or the stakes, or what the tone of a scene happens to be there were jokes flying in to shatter the tenor of the moment. None of which were funny. I was honestly startled when someone in the audience laughed at one of the jokes.
This was the movie that made it clear that the vast majority of teenage girls in the new Marvelverse would be just as smart as Tony Stark.
There was no part of this movie worth seeing. The plot if you can call it that is just one contrivance after another whose only purpose was to get to the next contrivance. The jokes were unfunny and inappropriate. MODOK got a redemption arc because Cassie called him a dick, so MODOK heroically dies defeating Kang, and his death scene is making fun of him as he checks out.
This thing was killed by studio notes. It was obviously and repeatedly thrown down the editing room garbage disposal, fished out of the sewage line, slapped back together again, and sent out for more audience testing. It is utterly unwatchable. It is without question the worst Marvel movie ever made.”
The inept script, incomprehensible story, bastardized comic book characters (poor MODOK), and effects that would get you fired off YouTube’s The Corridor Crew have become reliable staples of Marvel movies. If you want to put Marvel’s collective dysfunction in a nutshell, this phrase sums it up: They legitimately thought Antman 3 was a really good move.
4. The Little Mermaid
This was the black swan that landed on the Disney brand. Strange World they could write off as a failed new franchise but Little Mermaid was a live-action remake and failure of one of those strikes at the heart of Disney’s longest-standing business strategy: The Vault.
The Vault has changed form over the years. At first, it was theatrical re-releases of classics that would be cycled into the cinemas once every seven years or so. Disney would stress in its marketing that this would be the last chance to see, let’s say, 101 Dalmatians for seven years, an unimaginable length of time for an 8-year-old who would then beg a groaning mom and dad to take him or again before it was “too late.”
Videotape killed that model, which set off a panic until one of the executives that work for Mickey the Great and Terrible figured out that videotape wears out, especially if it’s watched constantly day in and day out which kids are very likely to do. The Disney Vault was alive again.
The DVD bubble was the glory days of the Disney Vault. It was damn near printing money, (I’ll have to see if Reedy Creek tried to do that too), and it opened the door for cheap and mostly bad direct-to-DVD sequels.
But then the DVD bubble burst.
What to do? Well, there were already plans in place for Disney’s own streaming service but that was going to take a few years to set up. So, in the meantime, they decided to try a live-action remake with a classic property. They tried two different tacks. Maleficent grossed more than Cinderella but it was at a much higher budget, the latter had a much better ROI. But both made bank.
If Disney Studios was making Cinderella today, she would have ended the movie having slapped Prince Charming for being a stalker, then as a single, empowered woman, who had made her stepmother realize that her treatment of Cinderella was just acting out against Patriarchal oppression, started a home business with all of the women in her family making glass shoes.
The heart of the Little Mermaid was a romance and it is fundamentally impossible for feminist company to make one of those. All of the charm of the original cartoon was deftly extracted. Trying to follow that plot but with the complete ablation of Aerial trying to find love with Eric created nothing but another gaudy, Woke mess that no little girl in her right mind would want to see.
And the new music sucked. Lin Manuel Miranda cannot adjust his style to fit in with another composer’s work. He just can’t do it.
The final damage was a take of $568 million against a budget of $300+ meaning this is another one that needed to get over $ 900 million if it was going to gallop over the finish line but instead broke its legs getting out the gate.
3. Wish
Mickey the Franchise Cancer Rodent’s once bulletproof brand is now lying facedown in the gutter. There is no longer any question about that unless you are a Disney executive.
This film was supposed to be the pinnacle of Disney’s 100th-year celebration. It was meant to be a reminder of how great Disney animation can be.
Instead, it forcibly reminded everyone of what Disney is no longer capable of:
“The day Walt Disney put the first scenes from Sleeping Beauty into production, he told sequence director Eric Larson, “What we want out of this is a moving illustration. I don’t care how long it takes.” He actually meant something more specific: A moving illustration designed by painter Eyvind Earle. In one meeting, he said, “For years and years I have been hiring artists like Mary Blair to design the styling of a feature, and by the time the picture is finished, there is hardly a trace of the original styling left. This time Eyvind Earle is styling Sleeping Beauty, and that’s the way it’s going to be!”
“60 years after its premiere, Sleeping Beauty stands as a landmark in animation history for its singular designs and animation. The new generation of artists working at Disney, Pixar, and other studios cite Sleeping Beauty as an influence and an inspiration. Oscar-winning Pixar director Pete Docter says, ‘Eyvind Earle made great choices in the backgrounds. Most of the photos I took of the South American jungle for Up are just a mess. You can’t really tell what’s foreground and what’s background. Something we referenced from Earle’s work is how light defines where detail is. Where a streak of light crosses a tree, you’ll suddenly see this ornate bark; further up, where the trunk is in shadow, there’s less detail.’
Disney animated movies are now being shown in other countries with warning labels on the front of theaters advising families that “The values represented in this film do not remotely align with that of our country.”
This like every film this year was something Disney filmmakers created just for themselves and not at all for their audience.
With a production budget of $250 million and a box office gross of a mere $145 million when a humiliated Disney Company stopped reporting income for it, Wish is the worst bomb in the history of Disney animated films.
The only reason this movie didn’t land at number 1, was the scale of the disasters from our next two entries.
2. The Marvels
I am aware that I’ve been using the words “worst disaster in the history of…” A little too frequently in this list but I’m afraid it has been unavoidable. This is however, unquestionably is the biggest flop in the history of Disney/Marvel films.
It couldn’t break $200 million, even the mathematically illiterate Disney shills were forced to admit this one cratered so hard it cracked the Earth’s core.
“I’ve made so many Frankenstein jokes about Disney/Marvel/Star Wars movie scrapbooking. I indeed and truly am out of material when it comes to this new one. That said The Marvels is only utterly incomprehensible if you try to pay attention to it. Let the Kenworth truck-size potholes and continuity errors go by unremarked upon by your conscientious mind, and you will only be dealing with catastrophic boredom.
This movie was hacked into another dimension in the cutting room. All Marvel films are scrapbooked to death these days but this one was a special case. It is like watching a fever dream. You will see Kamala in her Ms Marvel costume in a scene, then the camera cuts away and when it comes back she’s in street clothes. This is in the same scene. Kamala gets the second bangle and then in the next scene, it’s gone again with no explanation. There is even a scene where Kamala uses her powers after she has lost her bangle. But then she gets both and loses one again. Look you have to accept a certain degree of “fill in the blanks yourself” when you are watching a superhero movie. I accept that but what I will not accept is having to fill in such a vast amount of plotholes that it looks like the result of a WWII carpet bombing run. That is not my job as an audience member, even in a Marvel movie.
Also, the costuming is nothing short of hideous. This was a $300 million plus movie with Babylon 5-level props and costumes but not storytelling and plot coherence. This thing looked dirt cheap. Since I know it wasn’t, this means that Marvel has had its key talent links in costuming and set design broken. Nobody halfway decent will work for them anymore.”
That is indeed and truly Disney’s biggest problem now. The glamour has been broken, and the talent has figured out that the bullshit you will have to suffer from Devil Mouse isn’t remotely worth the “prestige” of working on a Marvel or especially a LucasFilm movie.
And speaking of Lucasfilm, number one with a bullet on this list of suck is…
1. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny
In a terrible year for movies and up against some tough competition from its own studio, this film shone through as the worst of the worst.
Disney was given several signs and portents from on high about how bad this movie would be. It was under a curse. Aside from the usual LucasFilm Story Group cluster fuck development process of terrible ideas married to ludicrous budgets, and a legendary director that walked off the project, the star of the film had a shoulder injury that required months to recover from after about $150 million had already been spent.
Everybody keeps praising Bob Chapek but he screwed up a lot and not strangling this monster in its cradle may well have merited his firing. When Harrison Ford was laid up, Chapek could have simply killed the production, collected the insurance money, and made sad noises about what might have been. Proceeding with the project meant that the budget would be automatically doubled because of the time delay while Ford recovered.
Maybe if they thought this was something great it would have been one thing but how the hell did anybody think that?
“Writing 101, never use time travel. Not unless you are incredibly smart and autistically detail-oriented. If it’s a one-way trip, you might get away with it but otherwise, every midwit on Earth is going to spot the paradoxes you accidentally set up. LucasFilm does not employ any writer that smart. Worse still this thing clearly and obviously went through the Disney scrapbooking process of editing excellence through data-driven audience feedback. A time travel story written by retards and the choose-your-own-adventure Disney editing “process” resulted in complete narrative incoherence. Exactly what I was expecting it to be. The new LucasFilm never disappoints.
With an inhuman effort of will I’m going to attempt to be fair to Phoebe Waller-Bridge. She really isn’t the Destroyer of Franchises, she’s way too clueless for that. It’s the women producers who hire her (and look like her) that destroy the franchises. She’s just a symptom of a fatal disease and not the cause of it. That said no fan is ever happy to see her because any franchise that she’s in is about to get a feminist keel hauling.
Indiana Jones well and truly gets the Jake Skywalker treatment. Helena is suddenly better than him at everything, constantly runs him down, and gives Ford every excuse to wear his befuddled old man face as he is amazed by the glory that is Helena Shaw. Indiana is now her comic relief sidekick.
They go to Morocco, but they are pursued by Voller who uses Nazi magic to floo flame himself and his goons back into the movie whenever it needed an action beat. I’m not kidding, there is no attempt at all to explain how the Nazis suddenly found Helena and her idiot old man sidekick whenever the plot needed them to. I can accept that kind of disconnect once in a movie, like when the U-boat caught up with Indy and Marion out of the blue in Raiders, it didn’t break the movie but this does because it happens constantly.
Oh, and Helena has her own Moroccan Short Round. When she says, “When I first met him, he tried to pick my pocket.” I thought for just a second that Indy would reply, “Hey, I knew a kid like that!” Or anything at all that directly acknowledged the fan favorite beloved character. But no. Indy doesn’t mention his little ball cap-wearing buddy at all. The incompetent makers of Indy V are just straight-up ripping off Short Round’s origin story and hoping the audience won’t notice.
Say what you like about Short Round but he wasn’t an absurd Mary Sue. He had limitations due to his size. Moroccan Round on the other hand is a magic ethnic. You name it, he can do it, to include flying a Cessna with no training at all. Seriously, the kid does a Rey Palpatine and flies solo because he’s just that good. Do the women that run LucasFilm honestly think that flying is easier than driving a car? It’s not ladies, and gentlemen who identify as ladies of LucasFilm, it really is not
Admittedly, the bad guys are pretty magical too.
Skipping ahead to the ending because nothing that happens in this film matters.
The steampunk time machine is a one-way ticket to the Roman siege of Syracuse. Archimedes invented a time machine to try and get someone from the future to solve the Greeks’ problem. Helena, her sidekicks, and the Nazis all fly back in time. Making Voller’s plan crap from the start, I’m sure James Mangold sympathized.
You can tell Doomcock was right about the original ending. They were clearly leading up to Indy dying. He got shot in the chest and was getting worse throughout the entire third act. Except for those scenes where he miraculously rallied and could punch Nazis again. Believe it or not, this was the GOOD version of the movie.
The one that tested the best.”
This cinematic Lusitania was repeatedly torpedoed by its own studio.
When Disney premiered this monster at Cannes they didn’t insist on a review embargo and the European critics eviscerated it. It had terrible reviews hanging over it for three weeks before Disney’s American shills could be properly mobilized.
Disney said the budget was “approximately” $300 million but I’ve heard high-end estimates of as much as half a billion dollars (not including astronomical marketing costs). That was against a box office take of $381 million. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is quite possibly the worst financial failure in the history of the motion picture.
Anyone who both loved LucasFilm movies and knew how Disney reflexively does business began Mourning for the Lost when the sale was first announced. It was always going to be bad, even when talented people were willing to work for the House that Bob Wrecked, it still would have been bad because Disney would have to Disneyify it, the franchise would have its DNA mutated until it could enter Disney’s genetic stew. Anything that made it truly special would extracted, and existing characters would be warped to fit in or replaced by new ones so Disney wouldn’t have to pay the original creators.
What most people couldn’t see was just how bad it would be when the Grasshopper People that Bob Iger hired would invade the nests of productive people and start devouring everything in the name of DIE (Diversity, Inclusivity, and Equity).
How Disney keeps making such terrible films is quite easy to explain. Everyone who had a clue what they were doing is long gone. The ones that replaced them are so untalented and incompetent that they honestly don’t know good from bad.
What do you think the worst films of 2023 were? Leave a comment and let us know.
©2023 by Ricterorus
Could
I know I’ve been entertained. By how bad all this shit is, and how it all bombed horribly. lol
Agreed 👍
Cool 😎
Meg 2 should be on here!