Intro: A Subpar Five-Star Masterpiece

This past weekend, I saw One Battle After Another, a buzzy prestige film that is indeed worth the hype (or at least 85% of the hype). As I went to log the movie on Letterboxd, I noticed something rather unfortunate among my last five reviews:

• I awarded One Battle After Another—a virtuosic masterpiece and presumptive Best Picture winner—four and a half stars (out of five).

• Two weeks earlier, I gave Scary Movie 3 a perfect five-star rating.

You can probably tell from context clues that Scary Movie 3 neither qualifies as a virtuosic masterpiece nor was it a Best Picture contender. There is, however, a running gag in this film where aliens urinate out of their index fingers.

My apologies to the film bros who’ve seen One Battle After Another four times and are pathologically compelled to describe their Blu-ray collection to strangers. That said, I stand by my five-star rating of a horror spoof sequel from the mid-2000s. Sure, some may write off Scary Movie 3 as “bad” or “dumb”—and they wouldn’t be wrong—but I love the film anyway. In fact, the stupidity heightens my enjoyment, which is why it was my favorite movie when I was 11 years old.

To consciously appreciate something “bad”—like an entry from the Scary Movie franchise—you have to hold two competing ideas in your mind. The first is that a film falls well short of cinematic greatness, sometimes intentionally but mostly by accident. The second is that the movie is eminently enjoyable, often as a result of these flaws. But not every lackluster film strikes the rare alchemical balance of being “so bad that it’s good.”

So today, we’ll explore the films that managed to achieve lasting cultural relevance, commercial success, and devoted fanbases—despite being widely dismissed as mediocre (or worse). We’ll then combine these criteria to create a definitive ranking of cinema’s best “bad” movies.

Bad Films with Lasting Cultural Relevance

Most subpar movies are either little-seen or widely panned before subsequently getting memory-holed. No one discusses the cultural implications of Yes Day and Ghosted, or whether Central Intelligence and The Internship reshaped commercial appetites. Odds are, you read that last sentence and were unsure whether those movies actually exist (like the film equivalent of “two truths and a lie”). Well, surprise—they’re all real and they’re all less-than-stellar.

But