The 25 Worst Summer Movie Blockbusters of All Time

Don’t be fooled by the satisfaction provided by The Avengers—we’re bound to see more than a few bad summer movies this year. Just last week, in fact, Tim Burton’s disappointing Gothic horror-comedy Dark Shadows suffered from a muddled script and ultimately got its cinematic ass battered by Iron Man, Hulk, Thor, and the rest of Marvel’s awesome superhero team. But trust us, folks, Dark Shadows is on par with Burton’s Beetlejuice when compared to the latest big-budget summer flick, Battleship.

Inspired by, but hardly based on, the childhood favorite Hasbro board game, director Peter Berg’s (Friday Night Lights, Hancock) loud, cliché-ridden Transformers knockoff is, at its best, a reel of impressive CGI devoid of any narrative credibility; at its worst, it’s an early contender for the summer’s weakest film. And, yes, that’s even with the Rihanna/Brooklyn Decker one-two punch of sexiness included.

Is Battleship one of the lamest major studio tent-poles ever, though? It’s too soon to tell, frankly, but one thing’s for sure: As of now, we’d rather give Berg’s barrage of explosions, aliens, and wooden acting a second viewing than endure any one of The 25 Worst Summer Movies Blockbusters of All Time another look. Again, it does have Rihanna and Brooklyn Decker.

Written by Matt Barone (@MBarone)

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Release date: May 22, 1992
Director: David Fincher
Stars: Sigourney Weaver, Charles S. Dutton, Charles Dance, Brian Glover, Niall Buggy, Pete Postlethwaite, Lance Henriksen

David Fincher (Fight Club, The Social Network, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) has gone on record numerous times to recount the heated fights he had with 20th Century Fox over the script and budget of Alien3, the second sequel to Ridley Scott’s amazing 1979 sci-fi/horror classic Alien.

Being that Alien3 was his first feature film, following a string of successful music videos, Fincher had little power to wield at the time, and the result of the production’s unfixable tensions is a bold yet clunky piece of bleak storytelling that both wastes franchise star Sigourney Weaver’s great acting and hints at Fincher’s soon-to-blossom talents. To paraphrase the Alien-connected Prometheus’ Michael Fassbender: Big things (Fincher’s stellar career) have small beginnings (the underwhelming Alien3).

Release date: June 17, 2011
Director: Martin Campbell
Stars: Ryan Reynolds, Blake Lively, Peter Sarsgaard, Mark Strong, Angela Bassett, Tim Robbins, Geoffrey Rush, Michael Clarke Duncan

You can’t blame DC Comics for trying. Heading into summer of 2011, superhero cinema was looking to be in strong shape. Over at Marvel, the film wizards were prepping to unveil Thor, Captain America: The First Avenger, and, unrelated to this year’s The Avengers, X-Men: First Class, all of which proved to be both financially successful and artistically satisfactory. The brass at DC, on the other hand, were most likely shitting bricks over the discontented reactions over the impending disaster known as Green Lantern.

And once the masses witnessed director Martin Campbell’s all-around botched final product, the bad vibes only intensified. So what exactly went wrong? For starters, the film’s script is an incoherent mess, mishandling the villain (Peter Sarsgaard’s mutated Hector Hammond), turning Blake Lively’s love interest character into a caricature, and relying too heavily upon Ryan Reynolds’ patented, and tired, too-cool-for-school shtick.

What the filmmakers did harp on, though, were all of Green Lantern’s pricey visual effects, yet even those don’t cut it. Often looking more like a video game than a movie, Campbell’s misfire overcompensates for its hardly-there story with overly stylized FX, resulting in a lifeless CGI reel. One can imagine DC employees telling each other, after hearing the pans from fanboys and critics alike, “Well, at least we’re only a year away from The Dark Knight Rises.”

Release date: July 3, 1985
Director: Richard Fleischer
Stars: Brigitte Nielsen, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sandal Bergman, Paul L. Smith, Ernie Reyes, Jr.

You’d think that a woman who’d actually bang Flavor Flav would have a sense of humor about her work, but not Brigitte Nielsen. Well, at least not Nielsen circa 1985, when she, director Richard Fleischer, and the rest of Red Sonja’s cast decided to drain the bulk of the campy sword-and-sorcery flick’s potentially engaging mischievousness out of the project and play most of the film inexplicably serious.

The result, a fantasy movie that’s about as fun to watch as televised colonoscopy, makes us want to apologize for any hate we cast upon co-star Arnold Schwarzenegger’s 1984 sequel du junk, Conan the Destroyer.

Release date: May 26, 1995
Director: Robert Longo
Stars: Keanu Reeves, Dolph Lundgren, Ice-T, Beat Takeshi, Dina Meyer, Henry Rollins, Udo Kier, Von Flores

No, we’re not going to use a silly “It should’ve been called Johnny Moronic” punchline here, because that’d be about as uninspired as the 1995 movie itself. But such jokey laziness certainly wouldn’t be undeserved. In what’s ostensibly a Blade Runner rip-off with much less action, Keanu Reeves gives one of all his all-time great (meaning bad) performances as a memory-less hero fighting Yakuza criminals and other futuristic baddies as he searches for a chip that will restore those missing recollections.

Sounds promising enough, right? Indeed, thus it’s a damn shame that most of the excruciating Johnny Mnemonic requires Reeves to deliver overlong monologues with his worst I’m-half-asleep delivery.

Release date: August 8, 1980
Director: Robert Greenwald
Stars: Olivia Newton-John, Michael Beck, Gene Kelly, James Sloyan

By their inherent nature, big-budget musicals are meant to be gaudy, lavish productions, so no one can fault Robert Greenwald’s Xanadu for looking like it cost a fortune—it’s just too bad that nobody involved knew what the hell they wanted the film to be. Set mostly inside a fancy nightclub, Xanadu’s grandiose musical numbers bounce around from old-school swing to rock ‘n’ roll, and even to country for no discernible reason. It’s the work of filmmakers aching to hit the widest range of viewers possible, and the stretch-marks caused by such reaching are nauseating.

Release date: August 7, 1987
Director: Gary Goddard
Stars: Dolph Lundgren, Frank Langella, Anthony De Longis, Meg Foster, Courteney Cox, Tony Carroll, Chelsea Field, Billy Barty

With all of the once-sacred, childhood properties that Hollywood has ravaged over the years, it’s crazy to think that He-Man has somehow avoided the embarrassment. Perhaps bigwig producers feel bad enough for the character after his tarnishing at the hands of star Dolph Lundgren and everyone else involved with 1987’s Masters of the Universe.

How pathetically thrifty is the flick? Instead of, you know, building an impressive intergalactic-looking set that’s worthy of He-Man’s powers, the filmmakers whipped up a lame plot element (a stray power bolt sends He-Man and his nemesis, Skeletor, from outerspace to California) to place the film’s action on Earth—more specifically, a shopping mall vast enough to discharge sparklers, in lieu of actual fire. By the power of numbskulls!

Release date: July 22, 1977
Director: Michael Anderson
Stars: Richard Harris, Charlotte Rampling, Will Sampson, Bo Derek, Keenan Wynn, Robert Carradine

In the summer of 1975, Steven Spielberg’s killer shark thriller, Jaws, raked in excessive amounts of cash on its way to becoming Hollywood’s first legitimate warm weather blockbuster. So, naturally, the big town’s hotshot producers quickly scrambled to mimic its success.

One of the first knockoffs, the murderous whale disaster Orca, is undoubtedly one of the worst; the one difference, though, is that Orca is totally cuckoo. Whales shed tears, commit suicide, and burst out of other’s chests a la the infamous scene Alien would perfect two years later. And none of it makes a lick of sense or even flirts with being scary.

Release date: July 29, 1983
Director: Peter Yates
Stars: Ken Marshall, Lysette Anthony, Freddie Jones, Francesca Annis, Alun Armstrong, David Battley, Liam Neeson, Robbie Coltrane, John Welsh

Clearly, director Peter Yates and screenwriter Stanford Sherman loved action films and fantasy blockbusters at the time they made Krull. With its rudimentary plot (prince tries to save a princess from the clutches of a monster) intact, Krull is endlessly derivative, pilfering scenes and ideas from much better, earlier films, namely Robin Hood and Star Wars, yet its copycat sequences are all shot with an overriding dullness that none of its predecessors inspired.

Release date: July 28, 1995
Director: Kevin Reynolds
Stars: Kevin Costner, Dennis Hopper, Jeanne Tripplehorn, Tina Majorino, Michael Jeter, Kim Coates

You can’t fault Kevin Costner and director Kevin Reynolds for their ambition. Waterworld, a $175-million clusterfuck, is packed with huge ideas and nautical razzle-dazzle, but what it’s sorely missing is any one defining characteristic that’d give anyone a reason to ever watch its 135-minute-long slog again. And the unintentionally hilarious sight of Costner drinking recycled urine doesn’t count.

Release date: May 4, 2007
Director: Sam Raimi
Stars: Tobey Maguire, Kirsten Dunst, James Franco, Thomas Haden Church, Topher Grace, Bryce Dallas Howard

Yes, Spider-Man 3 is an overlong superhero misfire that’s filled to the proverbial brim with too many villains and underdeveloped subplots. But there are two specific reasons why it has landed on this not-so-illustrious countdown.

One, Sam Raimi and company turned the fan favorite villain Venom into a blink-and-you’ll-miss-him dud—played by the seriously miscast Topher Grace, no less. And two, that infamous (for all the wrong reasons) montage in which Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire), thinking he’s super-cool, dresses like a hipster jerkoff, sports a Goth kid’s hairdo, and flamboyantly dances the film into utter humiliation.

Release date: August 17, 1984
Director: John Guillermin
Stars: Tanya Roberts, Ted Wass, Donovan Scott, Princess Elizabeth of Toro, France Zobda, Trevor Thomas, Clifton Jones

Forget that Sheena, based on a then-popular comic about an orphan turned warrior chick, features a horse that’s painted to look like a zebra, or that it’s nearly two hours long and devoid of a single noteworthy scene. The film’s real crime is that Tanya Roberts, its unfortunate star, gives a truly bland, at times robotic performance, completely ruining any enjoyment one might take from watching her strut her gorgeous stuff in that skimpy two-piece outfit.

After checking out Sheena (at your own peril), just try having a daydream in which Roberts doesn’t unbecomingly sleepwalk her way into your bed.

Release date: July 11, 2003
Director: Stephen Norrington
Stars: Sean Connery, Naseeruddin Shah, Tony Curran, Peta Wilson, Shane West, Stuart Townsend, Jason Flemyng, Richard Roxburgh

Comic book demigod Alan Moore absolutely hates it when filmmakers fuck with his work—after seeing Stephen Norrington’s dreadful 2003 adaptation of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, can anyone blame him? Norrington couldn’t bother himself with such trivial things as story and excitement when there were so many expensive things he could do with a computer during post-production. Loud, pricey-looking, painfully bland, and lacking all of Moore's development of classic literary figures,The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is $78 million that might as well have been stuffed into a paper shredder.

Release date: May 19, 1999
Director: George Lucas
Stars: Liam Neeson, Ewan McGregor, Natalie Portman, Jake Lloyd, Ian McDiarmid, Kenny Baker, Ahmed Best, Ray Park, Pernilla August, Frank Oz, Samuel L. Jackson, Terence Stamp

Did the world really need any more Star Wars movies after 1983’s marginally strong Return of the Jedi? Any self-respecting science fiction fan would answer, “Hell fucking no,” but George Lucas, on the other hand, wasn’t about to let those surefire dollars slip away.

Nor was he interested in pulling lively performances from The Phantom Menace’s otherwise gifted cast (specifically, Liam Neeson, Ewan McGregor, and Natalie Portman, who are all oddly nondescript), or, much to the undying disdain of The Force’s biggest supporters, ready to give a damn about offending various ethnic groups with wildly racist caricatures like Jar Jar Binks and Watto.

Release date: June 17, 1983
Director: Richard Lester
Stars: Christopher Reeve, Richard Pryor, Jackie Cooper, Margot Kidder, Marc McClure, Annette O’Toole, Annie Ross, Robert Vaughn

Call it the anti-Christopher Nolan superhero movie, and not just because it’s the polar opposite of good. Superman III, for whatever reason, totally changes the tone of its memorable predecessors, that of serious heroics and exciting drama, and goes for ridiculous slapstick comedy, and nothing about it is effectively humorous. Especially not the fact that director Richard Lester somehow managed to make the great, though sadly out of place, Richard Pryor brutally unfunny. Apparently, Pryor’s kryptonite is awful screenwriting.

Release date: July 29, 2005
Director: Rob Cohen
Stars: Josh Lucas, Jamie Foxx, Jessica Biel, Sam Shepard, Joe Morton, Richard Roxburgh

Ten minutes into Stealth, one gets the strong impression that director Rob Cohen’s deepest desire was to create a Top Gun for the new millennium, albeit one with the milquetoast Josh Lucas in Tom Cruise’s place, a boring script, and bang-zoom edits and quick cuts that completely ruin every action sequence. Mission, obviously, failed. Now, if he, in fact, wanted to give 2005 audiences a loud reason to revisit Top Gun and remind themselves about cinematic quality, then Cohen killed it. But we’re thinking otherwise.

Release date: June 25, 1982
Director: Hal Needham
Stars: Barry Bostwick, Michael Beck, Persis Khambatta, Edward Mulhare

A lot of money went into Megaforce—an estimated $20 million, actually. And the plot, about a military squad on a violent mission to save a town from evil rulers, lends itself well to chest-bumping spectacle and thrilling set-pieces. Which all makes director Hal Needham’s total ineptitude all the more appalling, Hardly any of that $20 mil is visible on the screen, either. The film’s special effects are so cheaply rendered that little boys enacting battles with their G.I. Joe action figures staged better action in the early ’80s.

Release date: June 13, 1997
Director: Jan de Bont
Stars: Sandra Bullock, Jason Patric, Willem Dafoe, Temuera Morrison, Glenn Plummer

Keanu Reeves has made some poor decisions throughout his career, but one right choice that deserves the utmost respect was his refusal to cash an easy paycheck and star in Speed 2: Cruise Control, the sequel to his 1994 runaway action hit. Our guess: He read the script.

Without his original leading man, returning director Jan de Bont cast Jason Patric, who’s somehow blander than Reeves, to join Sandra Bullock in a paint-by-numbers snoozer that replaces Speed’s unstoppable bus with an ocean liner, and Dennis Hopper’s wicked villain with a shamed Willem Dafoe’s hackneyed rabble-rouser.

Release date: May 28, 1993
Directors: Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel
Stars: Bob Hoskins, John Leguizamo, Dennis Hopper, Samantha Mathis, Fisher Stevens, Richard Edson, Fiona Shaw, Lance Henriksen

Video game movies have always had a bad rep, and we know why: Whenever skeptics condemn Hollywood’s console-to-screen efforts, they’re thinking about monstrosities like 1993’s Super Mario Bros..

Truthfully, nothing about the Nintendo game ever screamed “Movie!” in the first place—it’s about a couple of plumbers, for Koopa’s sake. Possibly realizing that they were in over their heads, directors Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel over-stylized every single frame and ratcheted up the sci-fi camp values in every costume and performance. If only there was such a thing as The Filmmakers’ Game Genie back in ’93.

Release date: July 23, 1999
Director: Jan de Bont
Stars: Liam Neeson, Lily Tomlin, Owen Wilson, Catherine Zeta-Jones

The Haunting is one of the most convincing examples of what remake directors should not do under any circumstances. Which, as Jan de Bont wholly screwed up here, is to entirely abandon everything that made the original movie so special.

In this case, de Bont’s 1999 atrocity is all overcooked special effects, visible supernatural forces, and general pomposity, whereas acclaimed director Robert Wise’s 1963 O.G. The Haunting is a brilliant classic thanks to its overall restraint, slow-burning creepiness, and never-seen ghosts that cause soiled underwear simply through noises and suggestion.

Release date: July 23, 2004
Director: Pitof
Stars: Halle Berry, Benjamin Bratt, Sharon Stone, Lambert Wilson, Frances Conroy, Alex Borstein

Forgiving Halle Berry for squandering most of her Monster’s Ball Academy Award win’s good will by starring in Catwoman isn’t the ideal approach, but it’s justified. And not just because of that skin-revealing costume, though it’s a big help.

In her defense, Berry is the only bright spot in the film, giving a charming enough performance to make the superhero more than a dominatrix fantasy; the one who deserves the most blame is filmmaker Pitof, whose foolish concept of using unnecessary quick cuts and goofy CGI leaves Catwoman looking like a movie directed by an autistic feline.

Release date: June 20, 1997
Director: Joel Schumacher
Stars: George Clooney, Chris O’Donnell, Alicia Silverstone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Uma Thurman, Pat Hingle, Michael Gough

Love them or think they’re overhyped, Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies wonderfully capture one of the character’s biggest defining traits: Bruce Wayne has a tortured, dark soul. It's a personality trait that Joel Schumacher hoped to lighten up in 1997’s Batman & Robin via an onslaught of inane one-liners and wretched puns (i.e., everything that comes out of Arnold “Mr. Freeze” Schwarzenegger’s mouth) and distractingly ridiculous costumes (see: George “Batman” Clooney’s nipple-promoting suit). Just one of the many reasons why you should appreciate what Chris Nolan has been doing.

Release date: July 22, 1983
Director: Joe Alves
Stars: Dennis Quaid, Bess Armstrong, Simon MacCorkindale, Louis Gossett, Jr., John Putch, Lea Thompson, Harry Grant

Whenever you’re about to complain about Hollywood’s obsession with three-dimensional technology, just say to yourself, “It could always be worse.” It’s true, filmmakers nowadays could, in a worst case scenario, mishandle the technology as heinously as director Joe Alves and his Jaws 3D cohorts.

By using shitty-looking 3D, Alves helped the killer fish franchise—which, mind you, should’ve stopped with Steven Spielberg’s brilliant original—to officially jump the shark; as in, shooting a laughable sequence in which a shameless Jaws literally jumps through a large glass wall and resembles the effects seen 25 years later in Birdemic: Shock and Terror.

Release date: May 20, 1998
Director: Roland Emmerich
Stars: Matthew Broderick, Jean Reno, Maria Pitillo, Hank Azaria, Kevin Dunn, Harry Shearer, Michael Lerner, Doug Savant

Watching 1998’s laughably bad reboot of the classic Japanese movie monster Godzilla, it’s easy to see that director Roland Emmerich (Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow) made the film with a real enthusiasm for the original property. And who can blame him? Anyone who grew up with a working imagination should’ve, at one point in his or her life, giddily viewed Godzilla duking it out with the likes of Mothra. But, then again, Emmerich’s fandom makes his take on Godzilla all the more infuriating.

First off, there should be a cardinal rule in Hollywood: Never, under any circumstances, place a summer blockbuster on Matthew Broderick’s shoulders. Years removed from his cool Ferris Bueller days, the guy’s been no action hero.

Even if Emmerich had cast his buddy Will Smith instead, though, Godzilla would still anger genre purists. The million-dollar question: Why tackle a monster as iconic as Godzilla and turn it into a Jurassic Park reject? By totally changing the creature’s design and giving the God an army of little baby 'Zillas, which look and act like bootleg Velociraptors, Emmerich and company trivialized all of Godzilla creator Tomoyuki Tanaka’s brilliant work.

Release date: May 7, 2004
Director: Stephen Sommers
Stars: Hugh Jackman, Kate Beckinsale, Richard Roxburgh, David Wenham, Shuler Hensley, Elena Anaya, Will Kemp, Kevin J. O’Connor, Josie Maran

The news seemed too good to be true for movie lovers who grew up on the classic Universal monster movies like Dracula, Frankenstein, and The Wolf Man: Hollywood was bringing those iconic scare-generators back to the big screen for a major summer blockbuster. And then Boris Karloff fans actually saw—or, rather, suffered through—director Stephen Sommers’ abysmal slap-in-the-face of a film.

Tainted by cartoonish CGI for its werewolf, a Dracula who’s more of a straight-up douchebag than a malevolent charmer, and a Frankenstein who, get this, cries like a little girl, Van Helsing is an unmitigated abomination. Oh, the horror!

Release date: May 12, 2000
Director: Roger Christian
Stars: John Travolta, Forest Whitaker, Barry Pepper, Kim Coates, Kelly Preston, Richard Tyson, Sabine Karsenti

Some movies have such horrendous reputations that even people who’ve never actually seen the films will instantly diss them on sight or in conversation. And it’s not always fair, yet Battlefield Earth deserves all of the critical bile it’s received over the years. If not even more.

The worst part, which is saying a lot, is the fact that the film only exists because ill-advised Scientologist John Travolta wanted to spread the word of his preferred belief system in a popcorn-friendly way—yes, it’s all his fault. After years of failed attempts, he finally secured the financing necessary to bankroll this reported $44 million adaptation of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard’s 1982 sci-fi/adventure novel.

It’s just too bad that Travolta’s dream project fell into the hands of an inept director, who allowed his actors to walk around grunting unconvincingly in silly costumes, never stopped Travolta from hamming it up with a ridiculous vocal pitch, and didn’t have the wherewithal to realize that Hubbard’s source material is awful to begin with. Talk about stepping up to the plate with a three-strike count.