Entertainment
10 Worst-Looking Movies That Cost More Than 200 Million Dollars
It’s hard to put into words just how disappointing it can be to watch a movie with unappealing visuals and then look up the budget, only to find it cost an obscene amount of money. What might be worse is reading that a movie costs hundreds of millions of dollars beforehand, and then going to the biggest screen possible to watch it, only to get the feeling that all that money was wasted.
Such an experience can really make you appreciate something like the Avatar movies. Yes, the writing in those isn’t on the same level as all the other stuff, but those very expensive movies look very expensive. The same can be said for blockbusters like the recent Planet of the Apes films and most of what Christopher Nolan’s made in the last decade and a half. The same cannot be said for the following movies, with all of their budgets exceeding $200 million, and none of them really looking like the money was utilized to its full potential. For the examples below that have estimated budgets, or a budget that’s said to fall somewhere within a range, if the lowest estimate is over $200 million, then it was fair game to be included here.
10
‘The Little Mermaid’ (2023)
So many of the movies here are Disney productions, because that studio seems to be the current king of spending ludicrous amounts of money on movies that don’t always live up to such reported budgets. To be fair, it’s not like every Disney movie of the past decade or so has had this problem. Some have cost expensive and looked expensive, while others were comparatively modest… emphasis on “comparatively,” because spending less than $200 million but more than $100 million on a movie is still pretty huge.
To get the ball rolling, here’s The Little Mermaid, which was a movie that remade a beloved musical that didn’t need a remake. It was live-action, it cost $250 million, and in pretty much every way, it looks worse than the original 1989 film, which has a style of animation that might well be timeless. Dishonorable mention should also go to The Lion King (2019) here, but having just computer-generated characters there, and not CGI characters talking to live-action actors, technically made it a bit less uncanny to look at.
9
‘The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies’ (2014)
There’s always been something incredibly impressive about the budget for The Lord of the Rings. Yes, adjusting for inflation would pump up the numbers, but those three movies were made for under $300 million, so if you wanted to say it was roughly $90-ish million a movie, that’d be somewhat accurate. $300 million in 2000 equals $580 million in 2026, yet it’s still impressive even when you take inflation into account, because most movies nowadays with budgets just under $200 million still don’t look as good.
The impressiveness of The Lord of the Rings makes The Hobbit trilogy look inevitably worse, in comparison. The Battle of the Five Armies is probably the most unpleasant-looking of the bunch, just because it has a particularly high level of effects work done for the big battle that the title promises. Adjusted for inflation, it still cost more than any individual The Lord of the Rings movie, was made/released a decade later, and overall looks considerably worse than, say, all the action and spectacle you can find (and still very much get engrossed by) in The Return of the King.
8
‘Snow White’ (2025)
Lots of what was said about The Little Mermaid can also be said about Snow White. This is another live-action remake of a classic animated movie. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs might’ve once been seen as too sacred to touch or redo, since it was made in the 1930s and looks incredible, as a technical achievement, for that time, and it’s also so historically significant a film within Disney’s history. Or within cinema history, really.
And then 2025’s Snow White might well have looked the worst out of any Disney remake so far (the live-action Moana, based on the trailer, could be a competitor, though). “Uncanny” is the word of the day here, or if you want two words of the day, “flat” works. A third? “Uninspired.” All the negative adjectives. It’s never a nice movie to look at, and it’s all such a waste of money and time when the original can still be watched and appreciated today. Also, it’s worth highlighting Snow White looks worse than The Little Mermaid while also costing more, with an estimated budget of at least $269 million. Some estimates/sources suggest it’s higher. With Disney, it’s tough, because lots of the studio’s recent movies have “net” and “gross” budgets.
7
‘Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker’ (2019)
The Star Wars movies produced and released throughout the second half of the 2010s all cost pretty ludicrous amounts of money. However, some of them did look expensive. The Force Awakens, for all its flaws, did indeed look high-budget, and it was high-budget. Rogue One was also a visually pleasing movie, and The Last Jedi was also easy on the eyes.
Solo: A Star Wars Story wasn’t quite up there, but The Rise of Skywalker has been the nadir, in terms of the visuals of theatrically released Star Wars movies. At the time of writing, The Mandalorian and Grogu is not out, so time will tell how it looks in comparison to The Rise of Skywalker. But for now, this one looks the most out of step with its reported budget, which is as “low” as $490 million and could be as high as $593 million.
6
‘Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny’ (2023)
Steven Spielberg not being attached, as a director, to the fifth Indiana Jones movie was probably a bullet dodged, in the overall scheme of things. His fourth movie was already divisive enough, but The Dial of Destiny is probably a worse film than that overall, and even a talented filmmaker like Spielberg could’ve only done so much to help it along. It’s a bloated, messy, and unusually drab-looking movie.
Well, who knows? Spielberg could’ve breathed some life into it. You can go a bit crazy with what-ifs, like imagining if he’d done more with the money somehow, or would’ve directed in a way that might’ve kept the budget down. Or it was just cursed no matter what, with a budget that went as high as $419 million. You can be almost guaranteed that none of the original three Indiana Jones movies cost nearly that much, when adjusted for inflation, and even if they did, they’re still the ones that look better than The Dial of Destiny, so it’s lose-lose (all-around loss) for this fifth film.
5
‘Deadpool & Wolverine’ (2024)
This one’s liked by a lot of people, and so it might be a hard pill to swallow, but Deadpool & Wolverine is a pretty shoddy-looking movie for something that has one of the highest budgets in cinema history. It being here doesn’t have anything to do with the writing or comedy, because yes, some of Deadpool & Wolverine is indeed kind of fun, and it’s not an overall terrible or impossible-to-watch movie.
Nothing in Deadpool & Wolverine looks better than either of the first two Deadpool movies, both of which were made for considerably less.
If you’re willing to enter some speculation-heavy territory, the high budget here could have more to do with the sheer number of famous involved, in major, cameo, and everything in between roles, so if most of the money went there, that could account for the visuals being so bland. There are desolate and uninteresting-looking landscapes, and generally lacking special effects, with nothing in Deadpool & Wolverine looking better than either of the first two Deadpool movies, both of which were made for considerably less ($58 million for the first, about double that for the second, and then approximately five times the second’s budget for the third… insanity).
4
‘Justice League’ (2017)
To go easy on the Disney productions for a bit, here’s 2017’s Justice League, which was produced by Warner Bros. It had a production impacted by reshoots, and was always going to be an expensive movie even if reshoots weren’t needed, so it ended up costing an estimated $300 million, with so much of the movie seemingly being cut altogether.
All that cutting was a big reason why there was such a push for the eventually-released director’s cut, and that turned out to be a radically different movie. Zack Snyder’s Justice League (2021) did have things going for it visually, but the 2017 cut looks generally terrible. Some might argue The Flash (2023) looked even worse, but the lowest estimate for that film’s budget was right on $200 million, meaning it might not have cost more than $200 million, so it gets off on a technicality, basically. Consider it getting noted here as a dishonorable mention, though.
3
‘Thor: Love and Thunder’ (2022)
Since there was a worse-looking MCU movie made in 2023, Thor: Love and Thunder doesn’t look the worst out of all the franchise’s $200+ million movies for long, but still, it remains worthy of being considered the second-worst-looking. Inflation can’t account entirely for the previous Thor movie costing $180 million, compared to Love and Thunder’s $250 million budget, though even if they did cost exactly the same, Thor: Ragnarok put that money to better use.
There are a few shots in Thor: Love and Thunder that are particularly infamous, like the floating head projection and that one image of Chris Hemsworth and Natalie Portman looking garish and standing against a background that somehow looks both garish and somehow also flat at the same time, but the whole movie looks bad. It might’ve been the first MCU movie to look genuinely inferior to some of the MCU TV shows, and it contributed to that growing sense of fatigue some have felt with the whole cinematic universe post-Avengers: Endgame.
2
‘The Electric State’ (2025)
The Russo brothers directed two Captain America movies, and then two Avengers movies, then went and did some other projects before Marvel pulled them back to direct the upcoming Avengers: Doomsday. Those four Marvel movies they made were all expensive, and besides The Winter Soldier, the others had sometimes shaky effects that looked a little unpolished, though for the most part, those movies at least looked pretty expensive.
As for The Electric State, which was one of the post-Endgame and pre-Doomsday Russo movies, it did not look very good at all, to say the least. If someone’s not talking about how much it missed the mark as an adaptation of a beloved and unique illustrated novel, then they’re probably talking about how ugly The Electric State looks for a movie with a reported budget of $320 million, which just seems preposterous, based on the visuals and special effects it features.
1
‘Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania’ (2023)
Since Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania takes place almost entirely within the Quantum Realm, extensive special effects were needed throughout the entire thing, and likely contributed to the movie costing more than $300 million. There are so many other Marvel movies that use copious amounts of green screen, of course, but either Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania has the most green screen out of any MCU movie, or it just has the most instances of poorly-executed green screen seen in any theatrically released MCU entry so far.
You could spend hours going over everything that doesn’t look right here, but the main thing is this: the special effects look genuinely unfinished in so many places, and it would not be surprising to learn that the post-production process was rushed. There are also massive problems with how Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania is written, and the fact that it set up a big villain for the whole ongoing series who’s since been removed, but the ugliness of it all, on a visual front, does stand out. It’s two hours of being smacked in the eyeballs, and even with it taking place in an alien (not in the extra-terrestrial sense) landscape, it still just looks all wrong.
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