Here's how we got on this: Billy was in soccer chat speculating on how soccer might have turned out differently if Lionel Messi had "accidentally" drowned baby Lamine Yamal in that bathtub. He then posted the poster for 2004's The Butterfly Effect to illustrate the concept of the butterfly effect. Luis piped up to say that The Butterfly Effect may have been the worst movie he's even seen in a theater. Now we're all sharing our worsts.
Giri Nathan
The only movie I've ever walked out of was Kazaam. If I remember correctly, I told my mom I had to go pee, and then after that we simply decided not to go back inside. I think even at that age I clocked it as irredeemable. The angriest I've ever been at a movie while sitting in a theater was Rise of Skywalker. I left with plumes of steam coming out of my ears.
Sabrina Imbler
The worst movie I can remember watching in a theater is Click (2006), the movie where Adam Sandler gets a magic remote that lets him pause, rewind, fast-forward his life etc. I watched this movie for my 12th birthday, which in hindsight was a baffling decision, one that I probably made because it was a new movie that came out right before my 12th birthday. I remember wanting to see Click because of the premise in the trailer: that he went to the BEYOND section of Bed Bath & Beyond. That joke was huge for me and my friends because we all loved to loiter in the mall. But everything is downhill for Click after we leave the BEYOND. Watching it felt excruciating, especially the scene where he fast-forwards through sex with his hot wife, Kate Beckinsale, in part because me and my friends were all 12. It was an even worse viewing experience than watching the impeccably mediocre Sharkboy and Lavagirl (2005) for my 11th birthday. After Click, I stopped going to movies for my birthday.
Barry Petchesky
Super Troopers is the only movie I've ever walked out of. It should have been in the wheelhouse of a group of high schoolers who thought weed humor was the peak of comedy, but it was excruciating. This was at the then-new Regal Battery Park, which we quickly discovered we could sneak into via a fire door in the attached hotel, so we hadn't paid anything to see this movie, and we still felt like we were getting ripped off. We left midway through and instead watched Black Hawk Down, which whipped.
Abigail Segel
I went to see Don't Worry Darling more than four weeks after it was released. I’ve always been Harry Styles–agnostic, but the promise of Florence Pugh in a leading role and the juicy on-set conflicts that had saturated the discourse in the months prior were enough to convince me to tag along with my more Styles-invested friends.
Here is what I remember from the film: The set design was pretty. The acting was bad (aside from Pugh’s, of course). Sometimes when I’m tired I put my fingers up to my eyes and hold them open in a reference to the odd little contraption holding Styles’s eyes open at the end.
The movie didn’t really feel like a movie at all, which is perhaps why, about halfway through, I did the thing you really shouldn’t do in a movie theater—nearly empty as it was—and pulled out my phone. I remember watching soccer, likely a replay or highlights of the Portland Thorns vs. San Diego Wave semifinal that had finished just before the film started. I also texted a friend: “We are unfortunately sober.”
Jasper Wang
Going with a non–Star Wars story, since it seems like we'll be flooded with Star Wars.
Mission: Impossible — Fallout was NOT the worst movie I've seen in theaters (it kicks ass) but it was my worst movie-seeing experience. I ducked out of work early on the Friday it premiered and watched it in a packed theater at the AMC in Times Square. At the start of Act III, just as the action moves to the Kashmir Valley, someone pulled the fire alarm in the building and we all had to leave the theater. After I mulled around for 45 minutes on the sidewalk outside with patrons of the Dave & Buster's and Applebee's in the same building, an AMC employee came out and announced that the fire department would not let them restart any in-progress movies (what?), and we could come back the next day to get a ticket voucher for a different screening. I came all the way back to Times Square on Saturday, but the people at the ticket window had no idea what I was talking about and would not provide a voucher. I refused to buy another ticket on principle and ended up watching the helicopter fight scene some months later on an airplane seat-back entertainment screen. It still kicked ass.
Justin Ellis
I was the exact target audience for the 2009 Watchmen movie directed by Zack Snyder: a lifelong comic book lover who re-read the graphic novel of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons's opus almost annually. I didn't really know much about Snyder beforehand; I didn't care about 300 and his Dawn of the Dead was too scary on arrival for me, a grown fraidy cat. At that point, you could sit me in front of most superhero movies and I'd have a good time: Sam Raimi's Spidey? Absolutely! Hellboy? More like hell yeah! Billy Zane in The Phantom? All in!
I was simply not prepared for the noxious slog that awaited me in the theater. It's not that I was expecting a bright and joyful outing, but Snyder shoved Moore's story through the muddiest and most gruesome filters he could find, while getting the most monotone performances out of an ensemble of actors who deserved better. Worst of all, this man's directorial vision was to make a panel-by-panel reconstruction of the comic and in the process somehow making an incredibly lifeless film. Not even the promise of a big, blue, naked Dr. Manhattan wrecking havoc could salvage this stinker. I don't know if I've re-read Watchmen since!
Maitreyi Anantharaman
Batman v Superman. I remember very little of it now, only "Martha" and the Debbie Stabenow cameo.
Tom Ley
There was a time during my childhood when I was going to the movies at least once a week with my mother, brother, and aunt. We just loved cinema, OK? And getting free refills of giant popcorn buckets.
I don't exactly remember why, but we had high hopes for Waterworld. Maybe the marketing was really good? All I know is that I went into that theater expecting to have as much fun as I had while watching Jurassic Park.
Unfortunately, Waterworld sucks! That day was the first time I can remember all four members of our family becoming actively pissed off while watching a movie. Eventually we all just kept leaning over to look at each other, making various "Can you believe this shit?" faces.
Still got popcorn, though, so it was a few hours well spent.
Sarah Borus
I went to see A Complete Unknown with my Bob Dylan–loving family. For two hours, I watched Joan Baez longingly look at a self-important man celebrating his own genius. Meanwhile, my father, who has seen Bob Dylan in concert approximately 10 times, sat shaking his head and saying “no” every five minutes as he grew increasingly horrified by what he saw before him. My mother and I shared a particularly cathartic “What the fuck is this” when the end credits summed up Joan Baez’s long and illustrious music career with the fact that she wrote the song “Diamonds and Rust” about her relationship with Bob Dylan. Yes, let’s define a woman by the song she wrote about her debilitating situationship (although at least it reacquainted me with the song before the end of my own debilitating situationship). The only saving grace was the family bonding provided by the two hours we spent afterward going around the table yelling “And another thing,” followed by yet another thing we hated about the movie. The Borus family has come to the consensus that Cate Blanchett did a better Bob Dylan than Timothée Chalamet, and we will die on this hill.
Israel Daramola
There are some movies I had a terrible time watching in theaters, and some terrible movies I went to the theater for. Some of those terrible movies made for a good time. But the worst movie I think I saw in the theater was Ghostbusters: Afterlife, the cope reboot starring Paul Rudd and directed by Jason Reitman as an apology to 40-year-old men who felt victimized by a Ghostbusters with women in it. It’s a bad movie, but beyond that, it was a movie designed to pander to a lot of (mostly) men who wanted to feel 10 again. And at one point in the film, when the CGI Harold Ramis ghost helps the team from beyond the grave, I could feel the collective nostalgia psychosis in the theater break for just a moment. Hopefully they had someone on staff to hand out some Gozer merch to repair things for them.
Drew Magary
The only time I walked out of a movie was Big Daddy. But the answer's still Attack of the Clones. I stuck with it all the way through out of old Star Wars fanboyism, and so I'd be ready for the third prequel. There are layers, many layers, of regret to that decision. I hated this movie more than Anakin Skywalker hated sand.
Sohini Desai
I used to have the pleasure of participating in youth soccer tournaments in Lancaster, Calif. I was a freak, so I didn’t really have plans with friends in between the games. I remember during one such gap, my mom took me to the movies. I was too refined for Kung Fu Panda. Too woke for Indiana Jones; the only film I’d seen in the franchise at that point was Temple of Doom. (My take on the movie: We SO do not eat monkey brains!!!!) Too early in my gender journey for Sex and the City (pre-transition tomboy not yet acquainted with my own fagginess). I’d already seen WALL-E, and even at that young age I knew to avoid the negative sexual aura of Get Smart. That’s how I ended up watching You Don’t Mess with the Zohan in theaters with my mother. At 12, I was too young to understand the Jabotinsky-lite sexual propaganda I was being subjected to, or to process much about the genuinely baffling levels of anti-Palestinian racism and Islamophobia in that movie. I really don’t remember much beyond sinking as low as possible in my seat at the prolonged sight of Adam Sandler’s jorts-encased bulge. I haven’t thought of it in so long, but “What’s the worst movie you’ve ever seen in theaters” conjured it with breathtaking immediacy. I will see it in my nightmares tonight.
David Roth
I cannot emphasize enough how little discernment my friends and I brought to Going To The Movies during the part of my life in which I went to the movies most often. This is not surprising given that we were suburban teenagers, and therefore effectively incapable of discernment and without many other entertainment options, but it is striking as I think back on the shit we plunked down our money to see. I cannot recreate the conversations that led us to get together and decide to go see The Prophecy or Virtuosity or Fatal Instinct, because they were so long ago, but more than that I can’t really begin to imagine them. I know now and knew then why it was that we wanted to see Species—our shared respect for the work of New Zealand filmmaker Roger Donaldson—but I can’t begin to access the decision-making process that led a bunch of contentious teenage dorks to put our heads together and reach consensus on going to fucking Midland Park to see Sniper.
None of those movies are very good, but also none of them are the worst film I’ve seen in theaters. I’m not even sure that the movie that left me feeling the most disappointed I’ve ever felt upon leaving a movie theater, which was almost certainly The Phantom Menace, is the worst movie I’ve seen in a theater. It was just the one that was the furthest from what I’d hoped it would be. And while I’m certain that the worst movie I ever saw in a theater was one that I saw during this period—once it started getting more expensive to go, and especially once there were other things I could do with my leisure time, I got choosier about it—the contenders ultimately congeal into an undifferentiated and undigestible blob of ‘90s-style big studio cheese. (In the interest of honesty, I will say that I continued to consume a great deal of that particular cheese, much more than was advisable or healthy, but I did a lot of it on home video. This would surely be an easier question to answer if I’d ever seen basically any Steven Seagal movie in a theater, but despite having seen a lot of Steven Seagal movies, I never have.)
But I must choose, and so I’m going to go with 1993’s Rising Sun. It may not be the worst movie I’ve seen in a theater, but it for sure sucked, and was a bad experience made worse for the fact that I saw it with my family, in a theater in Hilton Head, S.C. The film sucked in a way that studio films rarely do anymore, mostly but not entirely because no one is adapting the later work of the late novelist Michael Crichton, who was by the time of this adaptation deep into the dull and trollish reactionary phase that covered the last decades of his career. (It got very bad.) I also saw Disclosure in theaters, which also sucked despite being brave enough to ask “What if a woman sexually harassed a man,” but the differences between that bad experience and this one were important. Disclosure was thuddingly and oafishly sexist, but Rising Sun was thuddingly and oafishly racist against Japanese people, who were portrayed as scheming and decadent defilers of both white womanhood and longstanding business norms. Sean Connery plays a sort of Weeb Magus—you have to imagine Seagal wanted this role very badly; perhaps he was just not audibly Scottish enough—who Understands Their Ways; an impatient-seeming Wesley Snipes must lean on his guidance as he investigates the murder of a woman who either is or isn’t killed by a Japanese playboy during some moderately kinky sex depicted in the film’s first moments. It is all bad, but I give it the nod here because I watched those sex scenes while sitting between my sister and my dad. Just a very bad time all around. The Phantom Menace is probably a worse movie, though.
Billy Haisley
As mostly a solo filmgoer, I've walked out of a few movies upon realizing midway through that I hated them, but probably because of that I can't remember any off the top of my head. What I do remember is watching Baby Driver, a staggeringly unoriginal movie made up of empty aesthetic signifiers ripped straight out of better movies as if copied by a busted Xerox, and having an overwhelming urge to get out of my seat, go to the box office, and get my money back. Instead, though, I had to sit there and stew till the end since I'd come with a group of coworkers and I thought we all might hang out after. To make matters worse, when the movie was over, everyone just went home. What a bust.
Dave McKenna
The bad movie that leaps to mind was 1995’s Showgirls, which I saw with friends on opening night at the dear and departed Uptown Theater in D.C. The film had a massive pre-release buzz about it being the first mainstream feature to get an NC-17 rating, and the pairing of Rolling Stone reporter–turned–screenwriter Joe Eszterhas with a cast featuring TV stars Kyle MacLachlan and Elizabeth Berkley, the latter going straight from kiddie comedy (Saved by the Bell) to nude work. The plot was dumb, and everything was campy and over the top. And though it was in no way marketed as a comedy, we got lots of giggles—I still remember MacLachlan and Berkley’s aquatic sex scene being a total hoot. Yet while early on I was shaking my head at the awfulness, by the time the credits rolled I’d figured the filmmakers had realized at some point during production they had a pile of shit on their hands and, rather than try to fix it, just amped up the shittiness. And I remember having a really fun night at a great old moviehouse. Does this mean Showgirls is a good movie and I’ve wasted everybody’s time? Never mind.
Luis Paez-Pumar
My dad loves to tell the story of when he had to go to the movies with my friends and me so that we could see Hostel. The ID checkers were severe and strict at the local mall movie theater, and we really wanted to see the gore and spectacle of Eli Roth's Eurotrip gone bloody. So I called my dad to come chaperone us through the movie. My dad is not a gore guy, so you can see where this ended up going: He was horrified both by the movie and by our 16-year-old reactions to it. He still is, to this day.
Anyway, because life makes for a funny joke, I too ended up horrified at my 16-year-old reaction to the first Hostel movie upon seeing the second. Hostel: Part II, which came out two years later, in the summer between high school and college for me, is so noxious and vile that even at the time of seeing it in the same theater, I felt like I was going to some level of super-hell for having ever enjoyed Roth's particular brand of sadism and terrible filmmaking.
There's barely any plot to discuss, beyond the general idea that everyone should live life on vacation as if they were in a particularly anxious, true crime–brained TikTok. It's the same mental state that produced Taken, but at least those movies, even at their worst, orbit Liam Neeson's star power. Hostel and its sequel do not, and instead must rely on Eli Roth's sick 'n' twisted thrills, of which there aren't many. I'm not scared of gore, but I am often bored by it, and the swinging scythe kill in Part II was a "Who let bro cook?!" level of dull. I still have never walked out of a movie, and probably never will, but it was around that moment when I realized what a huge mistake I had made by driving 10 minutes, parking the car, buying concessions, and sitting down to watch Hostel: Part II.
