Bad movies are boring, dull and without vision

September has become something of a pop culture month for me. Writing about Madame Web got me thinking about what a bad movie actually is these days.

Take Street Fighter (1994). It is not a good film by any measure. But it delivers its lines so poorly that it becomes genuinely funny to watch. There is a strange charm to just how terrible it is. You are entertained in spite of everything. Resident Evil (2002 to 2016) is much the same, a series of cheesy B-tier movies that are not great but easy enough to switch your brain off and enjoy. There was also a reboot that nobody asked for. Terminator followed a similar path after the third film, becoming a cash grab with sequel after sequel until they finally got the message. Tomb Raider (2001 to 2003) is over the top nonsense full of plot holes but quite fun to watch. Super Mario Bros (1993) is perhaps the worst of the lot, a genuine attempt to bring Mario to the big screen that went spectacularly wrong. Then there are things like Sharknado, which I have never actually watched but which seems to embrace its own absurdity completely.

These days however we have a new type of bad movie. Ones like Madame Web (2024) which feel like a white hospital wall. Looks fine on the surface, does not really do much, and is boring from start to finish. Nothing to laugh at, nothing to enjoy, nothing to remember. There are some exceptions. Venom (2018) for instance is bad but far more watchable, and carries faint echoes of those older charming disasters. But even that feels more polished and less alive than the films it resembles.

I do not think movies like Venom represent something entirely new. What seems to have changed is that after the 2010s, as CGI budgets ballooned and franchises took over, films started to look and feel increasingly similar. The bad ones especially. Compare any of this to something like Lucy (2014), which is silly yet oddly entertaining. The plot is all over the place but it commits fully to its madness. That commitment is what is missing now. Gods of Egypt (2016) is a good example, a CGI mess that feels as blank and forgettable as Madame Web. Borderlands (2024) is a soulless attempt at bringing a beloved game to the big screen, one action sequence after another without anything to hold it together. Red One (2024) falls into the same trap, feeling like Dwayne Johnson attempting to manufacture a Christmas action franchise through sheer willpower. Both are professionally made, competently shot, and completely hollow.

As I wrote in my piece on the state of cinema, indie films are actually doing better than ever. Smaller budgets, clearer vision, less interference. The problem is simple. Box office numbers are in decline, costs have risen enormously, and audiences just do not show up the way they used to. So Hollywood has doubled down on sequels and massive budget productions, hoping scale alone will bring people in. It rarely does.

What needs to change is a sharper focus on vision over budget. It is technically easier than ever to make a film thanks to modern CGI and production tools, yet somehow the results feel more hollow. The focus seems to have shifted to cutting costs through actor salaries and franchise safety nets rather than asking whether the film is actually worth making. The charming bad movies of the past were often the result of genuine ambition outrunning budget and ability. There was something human about that failure. The new kind of bad movie has no such excuse. They are empty vessels, just as empty as the seats they are trying to fill. Some of these failures quietly disappear onto streaming services not long after release, which perhaps says it all.