Sci-Fi Dominates List Of Worst Movies Ever Made

By Nick Venable | Updated

transformers Worst Movies

Some of the greatest feats in cinema, made by the greatest directors Hollywood has had to offer, have been of the science fiction genre. On the flip side, a lot of the worst atrocities to ever make it past the greenlighting stage have also been science fiction movies.

To go from Alien to Alien Vs. Predator: Requiem, you have to take a big mental step backward. We find you can often can judge someone based on the distinction of them saying, “I liked The 5th Element” as opposed to, “The 5th Element was a good movie,” both of which are poorly-thought out sentences anyway.

But if anyone knows anything about bad sci-fi more than the fans themselves, it’s the guys behind MST3K and Rifftrax, Michael J. Nelson, Kevin Murphy, and Bill Corbett.

In 2012, Rifftrax held a “Worst Movies of All Time” online survey, which received over 500,000 votes. People on the Internet pointing out stuff they think is terrible? What a crazy idea!

You can be damned sure the results revealed a lot about what we already know as people, such as Twilight and its sequels being the Worst Movies of All Time. But you didn’t need a list for that. Just a functioning brain.

But you might not have paused to think that almost a third of the Top 25 films would be sci-fi flicks. Even removing fantastical movies in the superhero genre (Batman and Robin, Catwoman), non-science eco-horrors (The Happening, Birdemic), and moronic video game movies (Super Mario Bros., there are still eight genre films whose obvious errors cemented their laughable fates.

It should be no surprise that both Transformers sequels made the list, but I doubt Michael Bay is regretting anything when he spends all that “hate money.

The voicework of Jeremy Irons and John Malkovich couldn’t save the dragon turd of Eragon from this list. If you thought Shia LaBeouf wasn’t here enough, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (Harrison) afforded him the opportunity to reappear.

We were only surprised to see Battleship here because we underestimated how much farther hatred can fuel someone over mere ambivalence.

phantom menace

But the three most obvious choices here should have popped into your brain as soon as you read the headline. Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace‘s inclusion was not very jar-jarring at all. The bloated and incoherent Battlefield Earth is the kind of movie this list exists for.

And finally, the film widely touted as being the worst film ever made, Ed Wood’s Plan 9 From Outer Space forms the backend of this lot at the twenty-third spot.

This just goes to show you that if you can make a movie worse than the worst one ever, it is statistically high that your name is Schumacher or Shyamalan.

While the list is a bit dated, if we were to update it to cover the decades after this initially came out, there would for sure be some candidates. Will Smith and Jaden Smith’s father-son affair After Earth would have been there no doubt.

And who could forget (you probably forgot) about Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets. Terminator Genisys and Alien: Covenant would have gotten in there, maybe because of how badly they let franchises down. And Jupiter Ascending was flat-out terrible.

Don’t worry folks, the sci-fi genre continues to crank out misses with the best of them.