What's missing when think pieces talk about the love of 'bad' movies

Or: don't trust Rotten Tomatoes

Aug 13, 2025

Spurred by the recent hype over the 0% Rotten Tomatoes debut of War of the Worlds (Rich Lee, 2025) starring Ice Cube on Amazon Prime, the BBC published ‘So bad they're good - why do we love terrible films?’.

It’s not the first think piece to take on the conundrum of why so many people seem to flock to ‘bad’ movies. The Cut gave some thoughts in 2017 ahead of the release of The Disaster Artist (James Franco, 2017) and Forbes and Collider both put out top 20 lists of ‘so bad they’re good’ movies last year. These pieces don’t have bad takes, and they do a good job of combatting the assumption that watching these movies is just a mean-spirited dunk-fest, exploring the ideas of the sense of community that can evolve around ‘bad’ movies and how they often offer something interesting and engaging that many blockbusters fail to achieve.

But they are often missing what I think is a glaring question- why have we decided these movies are ‘bad’ in the first place?

The pressure to justify enjoyment

I am a lover of movies, and some of those are movies the wider cultural zeitgeist may call ‘bad’. Movies that get low critic scores on Rotten Tomatoes but much higher audience scores. Movies that get the confusing combination of hearts with low star ratings on Letterboxd. Movies that often come up in these ‘so bad they are good’ lists.

I’m definitely not going to claim that these movies should be re-evaluated as classics of cinema (though some derided-in-their-time ‘bad’ movies, such as The Rocky Horror Picture Show, have made that leap). But what is worth evaluating is what metrics this zeitgeist tends to use to determine if a film is good or bad.

Overwhelmingly, technical prowess is the key signifier of quality. ‘Bad’ movies are often labelled as such because they have ‘bad’:

Acting
Lighting
Set design
Editing
Sound design
Cinematography
Pacing
Story structure
Special effects
etc

It’s not that messing these things up doesn’t cause issues, but we have been trained into thinking that ticking these boxes is the core indicator of good film. High scores by these metrics allow us to enjoy a film without needing to justify why. You never need to explain to snooty film people why you like an Oscar-winning film or some critically acclaimed arthouse fare, because they have the cultural cache of technical prowess to do that explaining for you.

It’s when you enjoy a film that falls short in these areas that you are then forced to come up with reasons why. Elitist film criticism doesn’t tend to consider enjoyment or entertainment a valid benchmark for quality. Nor do they value reasons like ‘because I watched it as a child and it means a lot to me’ or ‘I watched it with friends and we had a good time’ or ‘I never knew where it was going to go next, and that was a wild ride’1. This leaves you reduced to the credo of ‘it’s so bad it’s good’ rather than the truth, which is ‘I enjoyed it, and that made it good to me’.

“I was raised with Latin and Ancient Greek and poetry from Greek antiquity…But sometimes, just to see the world I live in, I watch WrestleMania.”

Acclaimed auteur director Werner Herzog (genuinely) quoted in Variety in 2019

The genuine bad in the technical good

We spend so much time wondering how people could enjoy bad films that we often aren’t giving enough scrutiny to what people have been claiming is ‘good’.

This focus on technical achievement as the herald of what is ‘good’ can often come at the expense of overlooking a much more valid ‘bad’ quality of a film. Where some film critics and scholars are unwilling to look past bad technique for the sake of a more entertaining experience, they are more than happy to attest that you must look past deeply offensive and morally reprehensible film content for the sake of good technique. The same people who claim it’s uncultured to enjoy the Twilight films will insist you must respect the technical prowess of Triumph of the Will (Leni Riefenstahl, 1935)2.

During my film degree it was required viewing for some students to watch D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915), a film depicting deeply racist stereotypes that has been credited with reviving the Ku Klux Klan3. It was forced upon us, though, because of Griffith’s innovation of the close-up shot. Never mind that these close-ups were often of people in blackface. In discussion of the film, the racism was a footnote. It’s technical achievements and historical position in filmmaking were the key takeaways.

Recognising that films like this are technically good despite their moral turpitude is seen as an asset of a good film critic, where recognising a film can be ‘good’ entertainment if technically ‘bad’ or lacking is seen as unserious or unintelligent.

War of the Worlds may have debuted with 0% on Rotten Tomatoes4, but Triumph of the Will has 84% and Birth of a Nation has 91%56, which seems to throw the entire system into question.

This isn’t an argument that will push the ‘bad’ movies into ‘good’ scores. Plenty of them are morally questionable as well. It’s also not an argument to completely intertwine technique and context, as there is a certain degree to which we should acknowledge form in spite of content. It’s an argument to broaden our horizons when we consider what ‘good’ film is, because clearly the benchmark we have been using thus far has led to some questionable results that excuse content too much and respect certain forms too heavily. At the very least, we should be looking at the accepted list of ‘good’ movies with as much critique and confusion as we do the interest in ‘bad’ movies.

“I do believe that what is fascinating about WrestleMania is the stories around it: the dramas between the owner of the whole show and his son, who are feuding, and his wife in the wheelchair who is blind, and he is then showing up in the ring with four girls who have huge, fake boobs, and he is fondling them. This is almost sort of an ancient Greek drama—evil uninterrupted by commercials.”

Werner Herzog talking more about WrestleMania with the Austin Chronicle in 2002

Ditch the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ binary

Movies are not an objective science. They are an art form. As with all art, while there are techniques that can elevate it to a certain status, its value ultimately lies in the eyes of the beholder. If you like something, that is enough for it to be ‘good’. Or at least a certain type of good (and the main kind of good that should matter to an artist).

But when we spend too much time arguing over whether a movie is ‘good’ or ‘bad’, we miss the wealth of enjoyment that lies in between. Almost no movie is completely perfect, and almost no movie is a complete failure. If you’re a real film fan, there is always something to learn or enjoy in anything you watch. The mark of a true cinephile is being able to abandon the terms ‘good’ or ‘bad’ as overarching labels to find what works or what is interesting in everything.

I often feel like we live in a time when what you like has to have some kind of higher moral value, and what you don’t like has to be because it has an immoral value. You can’t just like apples because of the taste; you have to like them because of their health benefits. By the same token, you couldn’t just dislike apples because of their taste; you would have to dislike them because of some health detriment. This need for justification is perhaps more common online, but online is the place where a lot of film discourse sits.

In that environment you can’t just not like a movie because it wasn’t your kind of thing or not what you were in the mood for that day. You somehow have to justify why what you don’t like was actually bad on some measurable scale to maintain this illusion that we are all actually very insightful and thoughtful about our interests and that they always mean something virtuous about us.

But you’re allowed to just not have enjoyed a movie, no matter how technically proficient it may be7. You’re allowed to enjoy a movie, no matter how technically poor it might be. The same goes for art and music and books. Slamming what someone enjoys just because it is not what you enjoy is not a sign of high culture. If anything, it’s an indication of the opposite. A reflection of someone who cannot think enough outside of themselves or their bubble of film intellectualism to fathom that someone could enjoy or see value in a thing they don’t.

“Of course, Sophocles and Euripedes are a very sophisticated high culture form of it. But I do believe, and there is some evidence, that they had very crude origins which are not unlike the stories, the drama—the invented drama—around WrestleMania.”

Werner Herzog quoted in the Daily Beast, 2015

Recommendations

For podcasts that take this reverent approach to films, I recommend the obvious choice of How Did This Get Made and the more niche With Gourley and Rust, an easy-listening podcast about (mostly) horror films that spreads kindness across the spectrum of film quality.

Even more niche, I recommend The Mish and Zach Podcast, featuring two Australian comedians talking about films they love (they have also been making their way through the entire filmography of John Leguizamo for the last 4+ years).

For a comprehensive summary of all the times Werner Herzog has talked about WrestleMania, see this 2019 GQ article.

If you enjoyed this rant, you may like my approach to writing about film in general. I take an accepting and open look at films in the queer cinema canon alongside some other choice ramblings like this one. I’ve written about Challengers (2024), queering, and how much Timothee Chalamet’s career seems to be tracking that of Leonardo DiCaprio.

Drop on by. I’d love to see you there.

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