The most hated movie of all time, according to science
Cinema’s ultimate goal is to entertain, inform, and stir up emotions in the audience that leave them engrossed, invested, and enraptured by the characters and events depicted onscreen. Obviously, not every movie gets to be so lucky, although mileage varies on which flicks are truly detestable.
Everyone has at least one film they abhor with every fibre of their being, and it’s all based on personal preference. Some people can’t understand why others have been making a fuss over Citizen Kane for so long, and there may even be at least one brave soul willing to die on the hill that The Emoji Movie isn’t that bad.
Two extremes at opposite ends of the filmic spectrum, sure, but science did the world a favour by stepping into the breach and naming the single most-hated movie of all time. To be fair, the boffins probably weren’t required when the pinnacle of hateable filmmaking hardly boasts a stellar reputation, but it does at least confirm what many cinephiles already knew.
To crunch the numbers and separate the dismal wheat from the atrocious chaff, Stat Significant cast a wide net to calculate how many critical and user-generated reviews for any given picture were as low as they could be and then weighed it against how it fared compared to the other major titles that were released in the same year.
To the shock of what’s likely to be very few people, the winner was Roger Christian’s Battlefield Earth, a sci-fi blockbuster so risible it did irreparable damage to John Travolta’s resurgent post-Pulp Fiction career, tanked so hard at the box office it killed a studio after being sued through its arse, and swept the board at the Razzies by winning seven prizes, including ‘Worst Picture’, ‘Worst Director’, and ‘Worst Actor’.
Continuing to kick Battlefield Earth while it was already down, the Razzies subsequently named it as the worst movie of the ceremony’s first 25 years in existence and labelled it as ‘Worst Picture of the Decade’ for everything made between 2000 and 2009, all of which was richly deserved.
It’s not a revelation to call Travolta’s ode to Scientology a crime against the moving image, but it’s nonetheless heartening to hear science backing it up. Enough has been said about Battlefield Earth to last a lifetime, even if Kim Coates remains the only cast member brave enough to try and defend it from the battering it took, but the most bizarre thing about the film by a country mile is that the star and producer approached Quentin Tarantino to direct.
Instead, he ended up with the guy who shot the second unit for George Lucas on The Phantom Menace, which is ironic in itself when Travolta boldly proclaimed his passion project was similar to Star Wars, except better.
