The 21 Worst Movies of All Time, According to CinemaScore

There’s really no foolproof way to determine whether a movie is objectively good or bad. But there are plenty of ratings systems that can help you figure out if viewers generally liked or disliked it. The most popular is probably Rotten Tomatoes, which gives each film two separate scores: one for critics, and one for general audiences. (Needless to say, the two demographics don’t always agree.)

Another is CinemaScore, which only collects data from people who saw a given film in a movie theater. Basically, the organization sends pollsters to theaters in various cities across the U.S. and Canada on a movie’s opening night. As people leave the screening, they’re given a ballot asking them to share their gender, age, reasons for attending the movie, and whether they’d rent or buy the movie (or neither). They’re also asked to give the film a grade: A, B, C, D, or F.

The aggregated grade is known simply as the CinemaScore. While it’s hardly a comprehensive analysis of a film’s merits, it does help answer the main question you probably ask yourself while deciding whether a movie is worth seeing in a movie theater: Did people who saw this in a movie theater enjoy it?

It’s no surprise that the CinemaScores of major blockbusters are generally high. Top Gun: Maverick (2022), Avengers: Endgame (2019), and Titanic (1997) each earned an A+, while Avatar (2009) and its recent sequel both got As. There are, however, some surprises on the other end of the spectrum. In CinemaScore’s 45-year history, according to The Wrap, only 21 movies have ever received Fs—and not all of them are widely considered horrible movies. The 2012 Brad Pitt–starring crime drama Killing Them Softly boasts a critics’ rating of 74 percent on Rotten Tomatoes (though the audience score is admittedly much lower: 44 percent). And 66 percent of RT’s critics liked Steven Soderbergh’s Solaris (2002).

But apparently most people who saw those films on their release dates left the theater questioning their choices. So which other flicks engendered similar responses? Peruse the titles and trailers of all the other flunkies below (listed in chronological order).

1. Eye of the Beholder (1999)

2. Lucky Numbers (2000)

3. Lost Souls (2000)

4. Dr. T & the Women (2000)

5. Solaris (2002)

6. Darkness (2002)

7. FeardotCom (2002)

8. In the Cut (2003)

9. Alone in the Dark (2005)

10. Wolf Creek (2005)

11. Bug (2006)

12. The Wicker Man (2006)

13. I Know Who Killed Me (2007)

14. Disaster Movie (2008)

15. The Box (2009)

16. The Devil Inside (2012)

17. Silent House (2012)

18. Killing Them Softly (2012)

19. mother! (2017)

20. The Grudge (2020)

21. The Turning (2020)