10 Worst Films of 2026 So Far

The original Devil Wears Prada was sharp, funny, and mean in exactly the right way. Miranda Priestly was terrifying. This sequel defangs her completely. She is now in a loving relationship, learning to be a team player, growing as a person. Nobody asked for a kind Miranda. The whole point of Miranda was that she was not kind. What remains is a nostalgia cash grab wrapped in expensive clothes with an HR-approved message about the media industry. Meryl Streep and Stanley Tucci do their best. The script does not deserve them.

A grieving woman leaves voicemails for her dead sister. The phone number has been reassigned to a man who falls in love with her through the messages and flies across the country to engineer a not-so-chance meeting. Zoey Deutch works hard and the film has its moments. But predictable does not begin to cover it. By-the-numbers from start to finish, a film that hits every beat you expect it to hit in the exact order you expect it to hit them. Netflix makes an enormous amount of content. This is the most Netflix content Netflix has ever produced.

The Wayans brothers have the franchise back after 25 years and the horror landscape is richer than ever. Get Out. Sinners. The Substance. Longlegs. There has never been more to parody. And yet Scary Movie 2026 is a collection of jokes that mostly do not land, connected by a plot that has no interest in being a plot, running 20 minutes longer than it has any right to. Anna Faris and Regina Hall return and are wasted. The opening Teyana Taylor sequence is genuinely funny and then the film runs for another 90 minutes.

Two friends. Summers together. Are they actually in love? Based on Emily Henry's novel, directed sincerely, acted charmingly. And absolutely nothing about it is surprising, risky, or memorable. You know everything that is going to happen before it happens and the film offers you no reason to enjoy the journey there. A film that is competently made and completely forgettable. The kind of film that you watch and then cannot describe to someone the next day.

It is bright. It is fast. It has every Nintendo character that has ever existed in it. It does not have a story, character development, or a reason to exist beyond the fact that the first film made over a billion dollars and so there must be a second. The critics called it cute and breezy and mediocre and they were all correct. It will make another billion dollars and there will be a third one. And a fourth. This is not cinema. It is IP management.

An adaptation of Helen Macdonald's beloved memoir about grief and falconry. The book is extraordinary. The film is cautious, polished, and utterly unable to capture what made the source material so raw. The kind of adaptation that ticks every box and misses the point entirely. Safe in a way that is almost aggressive. A film that was made because the book sold well and not because anyone had something to add to it.

Sally Field is wonderful. Alfred Molina voices an octopus and is also wonderful. Everything around them is Hallmark Channel with a Netflix budget. A sweet story told in the most obvious, most comfortable, most unthreatening way possible. An elderly woman. A lost young man. An octopus that narrates and connects them. If you have seen any film about unlikely friendships healing old wounds, you have already seen this one. Competent. Harmless. Forgettable.

David Lowery directing Anne Hathaway and Michaela Coel for A24 should have been one of the films of the year. The performances are strong. The visual language is ambitious. But the film is so aggressively obtuse that it exhausts goodwill before it earns any. A film that says these metaphors are exhausting and then continues piling on more metaphors. It grossed three million dollars on a twenty million dollar budget. Admirable in its ambition. Frustrating in its execution.

A film that seems to believe that depicting ordinary life is the same as having something to say about it. Normal is exactly what its title promises and nothing more. No urgency. No surprise. No reason to recommend it over the dozens of better films released in the same month. One of those films that will disappear completely within six months and nobody will argue that it should not have.

A film that mistakes murkiness for depth and moral ambiguity for meaning. In the Grey occupies that specific category of film that has the aesthetic of something serious but none of the substance. The kind of film where nothing happens slowly and the credits arrive as a relief. Not interesting enough to be bad in a memorable way. Just grey, exactly as advertised.