All 3 The Kissing Booth Movies, Ranked

Many of the 10 best Jacob Elordi movies reflect how this "Euphoria" veteran has been on an incredible roll in his feature film career. Despite only scoring his first acting credit in 2018, Elordi has already worked with Sofia Coppola, Emerald Fennell, Paul Schrader, Guillermo del Toro, and Ridley Scott, while also scoring an Oscar nomination and working under the direction of Justin Kurzel for a 2025 miniseries. Before all of those prestigious efforts, though, Elordi paid his dues in a trilogy of widely derided Netflix films. Like Tom Hanks slumming it in "Mazes and Monsters" before he could land better material, Elordi's pre-"Frankenstein" days were littered with "Kissing Booth" movies.

The trilogy of "Kissing Booth" movies — which starred Joey King, Joel Courtney, and Elordi — aren't exactly considered the height of cinema. Elordi himself isn't a fan of them. That's a sentiment shared by the larger Letterboxd community, which has piled countless negative reviews onto these titles. Ranking the three "Kissing Booth" movies from worst to best (based on their average Letterboxd user rating) paints a vivid picture of the miscalculated creative impulses defining this enterprise. It's one thing to just mock the Netflix thumbnails for the various "Kissing Booth" films.

It's another to dive into the specifics of what makes these three movies so underwhelming. Though Elordi would likely love to leave these "Kissing Booth" adventures entirely in the past, it's time dive into the epic highs and lowest lows of this trilogy.

"When I walk into a cinema, I want to leave with an experience unrepeatable, unquotable, and indescribable," director Lynne Ramsay once declared. For many, "The Kissing Booth 3" lived up to those adjectives in the worst way possible. While Ramsay was talking about quality movies that leave audiences breathless, "The Kissing Booth 3," as evidenced by its 1.4 Letterboxd rating, left viewers agog in its "indescribable" badness. This was a phenomenal example of a movie being a sad low end to a trilogy and solidified the "Kissing Booth" saga as one of those movie trilogies that don't have a single good film.

The elements that went haywire here were pretty much the same qualities that were subpar in the first two "Kissing Booth" installments. The Letterboxd reviews for "Kissing Booth 3" are all about the terrible dialogue, characterization, and haircut choices littered throughout this movie. For a title that's all about fun and cheeky romances, it's staggering how many "Kissing Booth 3" reviews boil down to people bemoaning how repellent everyone in this saga is. Also common amongst these write-ups are people expressing glee over Jacob Elordi finally being done with this franchise. His stint was over, and that was an opportunity for celebration.

Certainly nothing else in "The Kissing Booth 3" was remotely worth celebrating. This wayward romantic comedy (which, like its predecessor, also had a bloated runtime, albeit of "only" 112 minutes) concluded this brand name on a fittingly dismal note.

Seminal filmmaker Charles Burnett once declared "you're either a storyteller or a liar." Given the 1.6 average rating of "The Kissing Booth 2" and rampant criticisms of its storytelling capabilities, it looks like this Vince Marcello directorial effort is much better suited for the latter part of that quote. Two years after "The Kissing Booth" became a trainwreck spectacle that countless Netflix subscribers couldn't turn away from, this universe returned with "The Kissing Booth 2." In the interim period between installments, the "Kissing Booth" creative team struggled to refine their craft. With this outing, they delivered a follow-up as bad as the 10 worst movies sequels of the 2010s.

A common complaint about this project was that it was somehow egregiously 132 minutes long. Features like the best movies over four hours long prove that there's absolutely nothing wrong with lengthy motion pictures. However, why was "The Kissing Booth 2" longer than "The Power of the Dog" and "Past Lives?" That was one of many complaints that Letterboxd reviewers had with this shabby sequel. The dismal dialogue from the original "Kissing Booth" only worsened, and rampant psychotic behavior across the various "Kissing Booth 2" characters is also a common punchline in these reviews.

"Every time you make a film, you learn something," iconic filmmaker Agnès Varda once remarked about this medium. "You approach other people, other people's work, some landscape you never noticed before. It's like giving sudden life to what you see and capturing the beauty in it." These words don't just speak to the empathetic and richly human approach informing her works like "The Gleaners and I" and "Faces Places." It could also be true for those watching movies. Experiencing new pieces of cinema can be an opportunity to discover new corners of the human experience. That's even true of the original "Kissing Booth" installment, which debuted on Netflix in 2018.

This feature's general reception was nowhere near strong enough to make it one of the 10 best Netflix original movies of all time, according to Letterboxd users. Still, the site's 1.7 average rating for "The Kissing Booth" did put it above its two successors amongst Letterboxd denizens. What did these reviewers "learn" from "The Kissing Booth?" Mostly what happens when out-of-touch adults try to write "hip" late-2010s teenage dialogue... and that people will make the most bizarre decisions when it comes to Jacob Elordi's hairdos. "[Can't] believe that this movie came out in 2018 and not in 2006," said one Letterboxd user.

The assorted "Kissing Booth" reviews are mostly a cornucopia of witty barbs and dark jokes rather than any in-depth analysis. Being the first in this series, though, seems to have made it moderately more tolerable for this site's residents. Maybe this entry also taught more to its viewers than its sequels.