I’m a bit late to the punch this year, but at long last, here we are! As I have done annually since 2016, I dedicated some time to sift through the myriad “Worst Films of 2023” articles that littered the internet throughout December and January. Instead of adding another unnecessary voice to the chorus of cinematic displeasure, I conduct a tally of what everyone else is yelling about. In theory, this provides a rough barometer of the movies that are *publicly perceived* to be the worst of the year. I’m not making any claims as to the quality (or lack thereof) of these films: I just report what I see. Think of this as a sort of public opinion measure rather than an expression of my personal thoughts.

As with last year, I made tallies from xx articles published over the past month, which includes entries from outlets like The Chicago Tribune and Rolling Stone. For the full tallies, the spreadsheet I used is available here.

This year’s tallies included 114 different movies across those 22 published lists, which was a step up from the 107 movies in last year’s tally. As with every year, there were some hot takes among them: otherwise positively received movies like Napoleon and Saltburn were mentioned in isolation. As with last year, there is a clear ‘winner,’ though it was followed by a tight cluster of competitively maligned movies.  Interestingly, in keeping with previous years, no movie was so unanimously loathed as to make all of the lists. This year’s leader was on a particularly low 10 of 22 lists (for comparison, Morbius was on 15/22 to win 2022). Aside from the low tally for the leader, this year was notable for generally low tallies across the board: a reflection of very little agreement as to what the worst movies of the year were. As you might expect, the leaderboard list is punctuated with sequels and franchise entries, with only one out of ten films not hailing from an existing intellectual property.

Speaking of which, here’s the final leaderboard:

1. Winnie The Pooh: Blood and Honey (10/22)
2. (Tie) Ghosted / Ant Man & The Wasp: Quantumania (8/22)
3.  (Tie) The Flash / The Marvels  (6/22)
4. (Tie) Shazam 2 / Fast X / Expendables 4 / The Exorcist: Believer / Five Nights at Freddy’s (5/22)

Any surprises in there for you? How many of these movies did you catch in 2023? Personally, I never heard anything about Ghosted. The only one of these I actually caught was Quantumania, which wasn’t a surprise to see here (though I didn’t anticipate it being that high).