Five movies from 2025 nobody will remember by the end of the year
The best movies are the ones that linger in the memory and gift audiences with scenes, characters, moments, and endlessly quotable lines of dialogue that seep into their consciousness and never leave.
On the other hand, the same can be said about the worst movies. Awful films have their fans, too, and there’s a reason the old saying posits that it’s better to be terrible than forgettable. 2025 hasn’t even reached the halfway point yet, and there’s already been an alarming number of features to fall into the latter camp.
Mediocre flicks have been the scourge of Hollywood for decades, but some of the highest-grossing movies in history have also been among the most mundane. It’s exponentially worse for something to be both forgettable and a complete failure, a box that the following five firmly tick.
By the time the clock strikes midnight on December 31st and 2026 begins, not a single soul will be able to remember anything from any of them. It sounds harsh, but anyone who’s seen them will agree that it’s true, because there’s genuinely nothing worth keeping in the memory banks once the credits roll.
Five brutally forgettable 2025 movies:
In the Lost Lands (Paul WS Anderson)
The easiest shot to take is saying that Paul WS Anderson has never made a memorable movie apart from maybe Event Horizon, but people usually turn up to see his films.
As a writer, director, and producer, the filmmaker has accumulated a filmography that’s netted almost $2 billion at the box office, most of which stars Milla Jovovich as the pair continues their apparent goal of becoming B-tier genre cinema’s Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro.
Prior to In the Lost Lands, nine of Anderson’s previous 12 credits had earned at least $100 million. The vapid and visually detestable fantasy with Jovovich and Dave Bautista in the lead roles? Barely even made it past six. Not a lot of folks saw it, and few of them will even remember they did.
Shadow Force (Joe Carnahan)
Once upon a time, Joe Carnahan was heralded for having the potential to become one of the action thriller’s most exciting new names, with titles like Narc, Smokin’ Aces, and The Grey winning him plenty of fans.
It sounds scarcely believable, but Shadow Force – headlined by Kerry Washington and Omar Sy as a pair of former CIA operatives and estranged love interests who end up being hunted down by their former employers – was only released on May 9th.
And yet, who’s even heard of it, never mind seeing it and remembering what happened? Hardly anyone, seeing as it barely recouped a tenth of its production budget from theatres before vanishing without a trace.
Flight Risk (Mel Gibson)
If the end wasn’t already as nigh as it gets for Mel Gibson’s hopes of returning to relevancy, directing a shitty action flick with Mark Wahlberg in a bald cap and CGI straight from the early 1990s will surely do it.
Flight Risk didn’t even include his name in the marketing, instead relying on Braveheart, Apocalypto, and Hacksaw Ridge to try and convince audiences that a movie that looked terrible might not actually be terrible because it had a competent and successful filmmaker holding the reins.
It did manage to open at the top of the box office, but when it’s so forgettable and derivative of so many better movies, there’s little chance the paying customers who propelled it to the top of the charts will be able to recall anything about it by December 31st.
Fountain of Youth (Guy Ritchie)
Guy Ritchie’s Romancing the Indiana Jones and the Uncharted National Treasure sounds like a stick to beat Fountain of Youth over the head with, and it is because all of those movies were actually memorable. Well, apart from Uncharted.
Wise-cracking protagonist? Check. Mystical MacGuffin? Check. Globetrotting locales? Check. A talented cast wasted in thankless roles? Check. A single sequence, scene, or line of dialogue that anyone will be able to recall the day after watching it? Nope.
Ritchie has found his niche in churning out action-packed fluff, but at least King Arthur: Legend of the Sword failed so epically that it made a mark. Fountain of Youth, meanwhile, doesn’t offer anything viewers haven’t seen a hundred times before, and a galling lack of originality doesn’t help.
You’re Cordially Invited (Nicholas Stoller)
Ten years ago, You’re Cordially Invited would have been a big deal. So big, in fact, that the marketing for the movie would have sold itself.
‘From the director of Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Neighbors‘ is a publicist’s dream for shilling a so-called comedy, never mind the presence of Reese Witherspoon and Will Ferrell in the lead roles. If it had been released in the mid-2000s, it would have been a goldmine waiting to happen.
Instead, it was dumped on streaming, and nobody gave a shit. The fact that it’s about as mediocre as star-powered comedies get definitely didn’t help, and anyone who claims they can remember so much as a single scene is almost certainly a liar.
