10. The Boss Baby
Alternately too juvenile for adults but with a premise far too sophisticated for children, inexplicably this has become one of the highest-grossing films of the year, which can only be accounted for by being released during a season where there were few family-friendly films in theaters. History will most likely not be kind to this movie; like a baby, it’s a rare film that lacks a sense of object permanence. Instead, the viewer begins to forget The Boss Baby almost immediately after it ends.
9. Rings
The original Japanese Ringu was a highly influential horror film, and its American remake The Ring was a smash hit. Even the original sequel released in 2005 was pretty good. And that was all we ever needed to hear about from this franchise for the rest of time. Featuring terrible acting, worse direction, cheap jump scares that might frighten someone who has literally never experienced one before, and an air of pointlessness that seems to have infected the film much like the haunted spirit does in the tapes, Rings still turned a healthy profit, proving that there’s always a new generation of teenagers who will plunk down their parent’s money for a few hours in a movie theater regardless of the quality of what’s playing.
8. Arsenal
Nicolas Cage and John Cusack have both made some fine films in their careers. Cage is an Academy-award winning actor while Cusack has a strange and affecting charm of his own, and both have enjoyed long and successful acting careers. Why either of them would agree to be in a film as shoddy as Arsenal is perplexing. Perhaps they both have money problems. There’s violence and action and tough guy talk but it’s also unbelievably boring to watch. Arsenal comes across as if the filmmaker woke up one day and realized he had a budget to spend but no idea what to do with it, so he hired a few name actors, cobbled together some loose crime film ideas, and started shooting until the film ran out. What was produced from this was Arsenal, a film that needn’t have been made and shouldn’t be watched by anybody who values their free time in any way.
7. Eloise
Audiences don’t ask much from horror films. Come up with an original idea, throw some gore around, keep the pace up, maybe add some humor or gratuitous nudity to lighten the load, and have it end by the 90 minute mark. In short, horror films are rarely expected to be Citizen Kane. But even these basic elements are absent in Eloise. The fact that a film based on a legendary asylum that must have hundreds of real-life stories that could have been made into amazing horror films, and was filmed on location in said asylum, instead was used for this Scooby Doo-esque mystery is a waste of all of the time, talent, and money of everyone involved in the production of Eloise.
6. Fifty Shades Darker
While the runaway literary success of the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy puzzled everyone, that could be excused: if people want to read poorly written erotica, then at least it’s nice that people are reading again. People even scoffed when they heard it was going to be made into a movie: after all, a notoriously graphic book couldn’t be anything other than straight-out porn, right? But it was cleaned up for the theaters to secure an R rating in 2015; critics hated it because it was ostensibly the same kind of crap the book was, but it turned a healthy profit and it was announced they’d just keep on making the movies until the story’s conclusion.
5. Ghost in the Shell
1995’s Ghost in the Shell is considered one of the best animated films of all time. This hard-R cyberpunk sci-fi film set in 2029 New Port City, Japan, follows the efforts of an assault team lead by synthetic cybernetic human Motoko Kusanagi to track down a hacker named Puppet Master who is 'ghost-hacking' people for his own political ends. Meanwhile, Motoko is haunted by her own ghost, which may hold the key to who she was before being rebuilt into the being she is today. Radically original and visually stunning, Ghost in the Shell became a high watermark for anime, becoming a breakthrough hit in the Western world and introducing a generation to Japan’s animation output. Now considered one of the best films of all time, there was no reason to remake it, but because people like money and hate to come up with original ideas, 2017 saw the release of the live-action Ghost in the Shell.
4. Snatched
Budgeted at $42 million and only grossing an anemic $55 million, Snatched is a disappointment in a lot of ways. It’s difficult to say what the problem was here, but the answer is manifold: the story itself is hacky, and in this context what was once Schumer’s greatest strength, being an edgy comedian, was watered down. Hawn and Schumer were also a mismatch, never coming across as a believable mother/daughter combo. The plot is predictable and all of the familiar beats it hits are telegraphed from a mile away. Finally, and the most crucial element of any comedy, it wasn’t particularly funny. A lot of the humor fell flat, and when an occasional solid laugh does show up, too much time has passed since the last one.
3. The Circle
Unfortunately, it wastes the talents of Emma Watson as May, along with Tom Hanks, Karen Gillan, and Patton Oswalt; Oswalt and Hanks especially seem miscast here as the villains of the film. Also wasted was the $18 million making it, which isn’t a lot for a film but this must have meant something to somebody to put the money up for it in the first place. Instead, it seems like a completely unnecessary movie and one that, although just released this year, is already behind the times.
2. CHiPs
In yet another example of an adaptation nobody asked for, here’s CHiPs. You know, CHiPs? That buddy cop TV dramedy with middling ratings that went off the air 34 years ago? Surely making a movie based on a TV series that nobody under 40 would remember in 2017 isn’t a bad idea. At least, that’s what Dax Shepard thought when he wrote and directed this film. On its opening weekend, it appeared in dire 7th place, having only made $7.6 million. It sank even lower than that the next weekend, until finally it disappeared from theaters all together. Crass, pointless, and somewhat unbearable to watch, CHiPs is the second-worst adaptation to appear on this list, the worst one being.
1. Batwatch
Baywatch was a syndicated TV show that ran from 1989 to 1999 and was once billed as 'the most-watched show in the world', recording a billion viewers in hundreds of markets across the world. The results of the movie were expectedly terrible, of course. Centered around a group of lifeguards on a Florida beach and the various intrigues and romances they get into, it’s possibly the most disposable film to enter theaters this year. Directed by Seth Gordon and starring Dwayne Johnson, Zac Efron, and Alexandra Daddario, one wonders why this film was made in the first place and even further why it has a two-hour running time.
