10 Worst Movies Of 2026 (So Far)

Several really great films have already been released this year. The best movies of 2026 so far are a mix of highly anticipated ones that lived up to the hype, surprise gems that seemingly came out of nowhere, and a few that fell somewhere in between. As for the worst movies of 2026 so far, horror is disproportionately represented. It would seem that for every "28 Years Later: The Bone Temple," we are being made to endure half a dozen absolutely dreadful scary movies.

2026 has also seen some terrible sci-fi flicks and some awful video game adaptations to add to that already massive pile, as well as a documentary and a biopic that paint awfully shallow portraits of their respective subjects. For the sake of moviegoers everywhere, we're hoping that nothing else released this year will be bad enough to usurp any of these existing picks, but we're not holding our breath. Here are the worst movies of 2026 so far.

• Cast: Jeremy Irvine, Hannah Emily Anderson, Ljiljana Velimirov
• Director: Christophe Gans
• Runtime: 106 minutes
• Rating: R
• Rotten Tomatoes score: 18%

When ranking every live-action video game movie, most of the list is just various shades of awful. It's no big secret that video game movies have had a rough go of it for as long as they've existed. And even when a rare good one comes along — like "Sonic the Hedgehog" or "The Super Mario Bros. Movie" — there is inevitably a "Return to Silent Hill" to wreck the curve. What's especially disappointing here is that the original "Silent Hill" movie managed to not only be shockingly faithful to the source material, but a genuinely good horror movie in its own right. So when its director, Christophe Gans, was revealed to be adapting the video game "Silent Hill 2" — generally considered the best game in the series and one of the all-time greatest horror games, period — there was reason to be excited.

"Return to Silent Hill" follows a man named James Sunderland (Jeremy Irvine), who is beckoned to the titular town after receiving a letter from his ex-girlfriend (Hannah Emily Anderson). They used to live in Silent Hill together, but the town he returns to is not like it used to be — the place is shrouded in fog, covered in ash, and almost completely abandoned. Sadly, "Return to Silent Hill" looks like it cost a few grand to make and only took a few weeks to film. The costumes look like they were borrowed from the local high school drama club. It's baffling just how much goes wrong with this movie. In 2026, we really should be well beyond this type of soulless, slapdash treatment for video game movies.

• Cast: Seth Rogen, Gaten Matarazzo, Glenn Close
• Director: Andy Serkis
• Runtime: 96 minutes
• Rating: PG
• Rotten Tomatoes score: 27%

"Animal Farm" should've been one of 2026's most controversial movies because it was bringing a dark and challenging story to the big screen. Instead, it is controversial because it all but abandoned the ambitious plans that director Andy Serkis had for it and instead feels like "Animal Farm" done by Disney. Gone are most traces of George Orwell's brutal allegory about the Russian Revolution and the Soviet Union's Stalinist era, replaced by overly cute designs, by-the-numbers animation, and an all-star celebrity voice cast just reading the lines as themselves. So what went wrong?

Serkis had been working on the movie in some capacity since 2012, and it was clearly a long, complicated road to finally get it made. But not all movies should escape development hell — sometimes, you just need to cut your losses and move on. However, when big money is involved and producers want a return on their investment, troubled projects are often dragged reluctantly across the finish line and shoved into cineplexes in the hope that at least a few bucks can be made, regardless of whether or not the movie is actually good or not. "Animal Farm" falls in the "not" category.

• Cast: Hayden Panettiere, Beverly D'Angelo, Justin Chatwin
• Director: Brandon Auman
• Runtime: 89 minutes
• Rating: R
• Rotten Tomatoes score: 14%

Horror has always been a crowded genre. To stand out, you need to offer something different. Naming your movie something incredibly generic like "Sleepwalker" definitely isn't going to get you noticed. Of course, if 2026's "Sleepwalker" had actually been a good movie, word of mouth might have offset it having the same title as several prior horror movies (and that's not including variations like "Sleepwalkers" and "The Sleepwalker"). But this "Sleepwalker" is not a good movie. It stars Hayden Panettiere as artist Sarah Pangborn, whose family has been devastated by a car crash. Her daughter died, and her husband (who was abusive before the accident) has been left comatose.

It's not a particularly unique premise; this is yet another psychological horror story about someone who experiences a personal tragedy that has manifested itself into a trauma-induced monster of some kind. Not that a horror movie needs to be 100% original to be effective — plenty of movies cover familiar ground, but succeed in covering that ground effectively. Sadly for fans of the former "Heroes" and "Nashville" star, that's not the case here. To help ourselves to an obvious joke, "Sleepwalker" just sleepwalks its way through an hour and a half of unscary, uninteresting, and uninspired obviousness. 

• Cast: Jaafar Jackson, Colman Domingo, Miles Teller
• Director: Antoine Fuqua
• Runtime: 127 minutes
• Rating: PG-13
• Rotten Tomatoes score: 39%

When it was announced that there was going to be a biopic about Michael Jackson, people immediately wondered if it was going to address the allegations against him in regards to misconduct with children. It turns out this is going to be a two-part affair, so we'll have to wait for the sequel to see how (or if) this is handled. "Michael" only covers his childhood, his time with the Jackson 5, and his solo music career through the end of the 1980s, and it doesn't even do that particularly well. This generic biopic plods along, ticking off the major milestones from Jackson's early days without really going into the nitty gritty of it all.

Considering the size of Jackson's career and how long it took for a movie about him to get made, a biopic that just goes through the motions and doesn't try anything remotely different just doesn't cut it. If this had been some made-for-VH1 movie released in the early 2000s, the lack of depth would have been a lot more understandable. The fact that it's a major theatrical release with some huge talent behind it — it's helmed by the director of "Training Day" and penned by the co-writer of "Gladiator" — and it still turned out the way it did is unforgivable. Jaafar Jackson puts in a solid performance as his uncle, but everything else about the film is a letdown.

• Cast: Chris Pratt, Rebecca Ferguson, Kali Reis
• Director: Timur Bekmambetov
• Runtime: 100 minutes
• Rating: PG-13
• Rotten Tomatoes score: 25%

Chris Pratt's 2026 techno thriller "Mercy" aims to make profound statements about artificial intelligence and the troubling control it is seemingly bound to have over us in the near future, but it's all a bit skin deep. It ends up being a boring action flick in which the legal process for criminals is carried out by being strapped to a chair for 90 minutes and pleading your case to an AI judge. Pratt's LAPD detective Christopher Raven is put through this ordeal after being accused of murdering his wife. If he fails to prove his innocence in the allotted time, he'll be executed via sonic blast.

"Mercy" not only wastes Pratt by not letting him be charming or even pushing him to do much in the way of action, but it somehow can't even make the normally reliable Rebecca Ferguson (who plays the AI judge) interesting to watch. It's the kind of movie you might be tempted to put on for a lazy afternoon of half-watching while you fold laundry or scroll on your phone, but there are far better options for that — this isn't even worth half of your attention, never mind your full attention.

• Cast: Willa Holland, Paul Sparks, John Adams
• Director: Jeremiah Kipp
• Runtime: 91 minutes
• Rating: R
• Rotten Tomatoes score: 36%

"The Mortuary Assistant" is based on the 2022 horror video game of the same name. It tells the story of a woman who takes a job at a mortuary and starts to hallucinate monsters and other strange things after a questionable embalming assignment. The premise is a solid one, and there's a reason why the original game won multiple awards, but the movie completely squanders that premise, wasting the few effective moments of tension and terror it has with clunky writing, mediocre performances, and trying to cram way too much lore into a 90 minute film.

It's a shame that the powers that be decided to turn this into a movie, as "The Mortuary Assistant" is a horror game that would have made a better TV show. This would have allowed for more time to expand on the admittedly interesting backstories of the main characters. But such is the issue with so many video game movies — it's just not the right medium for games that require a lot of context and exposition. Star Willa Holland (who played Thea Queen, the half-sister of Oliver Queen, in "Arrow") rightfully came in for some praise from the critics, but she's fighting a losing battle here.

• Cast: Madelaine Petsch, Gabriel Basso, Ella Bruccoleri
• Director: Renny Harlin
• Runtime: 91 minutes
• Rating: R
• Rotten Tomatoes score: 17%

There are many horror franchises with multiple installments that spawned from an original film that wasn't great to begin with. 2008's "The Strangers" did well at the box office for a movie with such a tiny budget, but critics and audiences were lukewarm on it. Fast forward to 2026, and we're now discussing the fifth installment in the "Strangers" series of films about masked psychopaths who terrorize people in their own homes.

The franchise was brought back to life in 2024 with "The Strangers — Chapter 1," and "The Strangers — Chapter 2" came out the following year. All three entries of the recent trilogy entered consecutive production to ensure their rapid-fire releases. There isn't anything inherently wrong with making movies that way, so long as they don't end up looking like three films that were marathoned back to back so they could get made as quickly and as cheaply as possible, which is very much the case here.

"The Strangers — Chapter 3" once again follows Maya (Madelaine Petsch) as she locks horns with the titular group of masked killers. She managed to kill Pin-Up Girl at the end of "Chapter 2," which leads to the other two members (Scarecrow and Dollface) hatching a ridiculous plan to make Maya the new Pin-Up Girl. She's immediately kidnapped at the start of the threequel in order to satisfy the conceit of these films, and 90 minutes of nonsense follows.

• Cast: Georgina Campbell, James Preston Rogers, Malcolm McDowell
• Director: Gavin Polone
• Runtime: 91 minutes
• Rating: R
• Rotten Tomatoes score: 9%

"Psycho Killer" had a journey of almost 20 years from early draft to completed movie, and the wait definitely wasn't worth it – this horror-thriller hybrid bombed so hard that it couldn't even make back its modest $10 million budget. A serial killer known as the Satanic Slasher (James Preston Rogers) murders the husband of a police officer (Georgina Campbell), so she takes it upon herself to personally track him down. She pursues him across the country, learning of his sinister grand plans and trying to stop him from enacting those plans before it's too late.

Campbell and Rogers both give it their all, but they're stuck in one of the worst films of recent memory. The main issue with "Psycho Killer" is that it doesn't really know what it wants to be — it's not clever enough to work as a thriller and it's not scary enough to work as a horror. The dialogue is tragically bad, the plot is beyond contrived, and the finale is utterly cringe-worthy. The fact that a sequel is teased feels like a bad joke. "Psycho Killer" has a score of just 9% on Rotten Tomatoes at the time of this writing, and that's actually generous.

• Featuring: Melania Trump, Hervé Pierre, Adam Lippes
• Director: Brett Rattner
• Runtime: 104 minutes
• Rating: PG
• Rotten Tomatoes score: 10%

Even putting political persuasions aside, the Melania Trump documentary "Melania" is an absolute snoozefest. It focuses specifically on the lead up to Donald Trump's second inauguration in January 2025 as told through the POV of what Melania had to do during that time. If you need a clue as to how in-depth and hard-hitting "Melania" gets, the names credited just below her in the list of people who appear in the film are fashion designers, interior decorators, and event planners. You don't come away knowing much more about Melania herself than you did going in.

Several critics outright accused "Melania" of being propaganda. "It will exist as a striking artifact — like 'The Birth of a Nation' or 'Triumph of the Will' – of a time when Americans willingly subordinated themselves to a political and economic oligopoly," said The Independent. The fact that "Melania" has a near-perfect audience score on Rotten Tomatoes has led to a lot of raised eyebrows (the disparity between the Tomatometer and Popcornmeter ratings is the biggest in the history of the website), with accusations of bot manipulation being denied by the owners.

• Cast: Neve Campbell, Isabel May, Jasmin Savoy Brown
• Director: Kevin Williamson
• Runtime: 114 minutes
• Rating: R
• Rotten Tomatoes score: 31%

Much like Ghostface himself, the "Scream" franchise seems immune to death. "Scream 7" is particularly determined to pull out all the stops in justifying another spin for the series, including bringing back half of the original duo behind Ghostface — Matthew Lillard — despite the assumption that his character died in the original film. Not to mention the return of Neve Campbell after skipping a "Scream" film for the first time ever with the previous entry. She once again reprises her role as Sidney, who must now protect her daughter from the latest Ghostface killer. 

The idea behind this was to get "Scream" back to its roots after the last few entries strayed too far from what the series did best. Unfortunately, several major creative shake-ups occurred behind the scenes (including Melissa Barrera being removed from the cast), making for a rocky development. Whether the final product would have been amazing if it wasn't for that is impossible to say. As for the "Scream 7" we ultimately got, the general consensus among critics is that it's the worst entry thus far. We're in total agreement — it came dead last in Looper's ranking of every "Scream" movie.