Entertainment
8 Biopics That Are Even Worse Than ‘Michael’
There is a new biopic out called Michael, and not too surprisingly, it is about Michael Jackson. The focus is more on his early years and rise to fame, starting in the 1960s and ending near the end of the 1980s, with the release of Bad and its subsequent tour. It was in production for a while, and had reshoots in 2025, which fueled speculation that it might be the first part of a duology. It would make some sense, given this film covers about two decades, and then ends about two decades before Jackson’s untimely death in 2009.
At best, it’s kind of just another music biopic, hitting all the predictable beats you’d expect and not really doing much beyond telling a story most fans (and maybe even a fair few casual listeners) will already know. At worst, it’s kind of more frustrating than something like Bohemian Rhapsody, which already felt too safe and sanitized in 2018, which was almost a decade ago now. Music biopics need to be a little more exciting, and so too do biopics in general, really. In the interest of highlighting some other not very good ones, these biographical movies are pretty lackluster, and are arguably worse than (the, again, not very good) Michael.
8
‘Wyatt Earp’ (1994)
Wyatt Earp is most interesting for not being Tombstone, and for coming out only one year after that far superior film about the titular figure, Doc Holliday, and the gunfight at the O.K. Corral. Since Wyatt Earp is a good deal longer (and you really feel the length), it technically covers a little more than Tombstone, so it’s not like they feel like the same movie, just of different quality, but the approach taken overall for Tombstone was also flat-out better.
For present purposes, Wyatt Earp feels more like a biographical film, and it’s a bloated and poorly paced one, so that’s why it’s here. The hope, in all likelihood, was that it would be a Dances with Wolves-level hit, since that was another epic-length Western starring Kevin Costner from the 1990s, but Wyatt Earp also falls short of that one by a good deal. Watching it, you’re left with a feeling of regret about not picking either Tombstone or Dances with Wolves to watch instead.
7
‘Judy’ (2019)
Taking a similar approach to Michael as far as titles go, Judy (2019) is all about Judy Garland, who’s best known for her roles in various iconic movie musicals. However, Judy takes place near the end of Garland’s rather tragic life, showcasing her attempts to stage a comeback during what ended up being the final year of her life: 1969, exactly 30 years on from her most famous film, The Wizard of Oz.
It’s got that Wyatt Earp problem of making you wish you were watching something better instead, like The Wizard of Oz or another actual Judy Garland movie. The film kind of came and went, though Renée Zellweger was praised for her performance as Garland… for some reason? She goes very broad, and it almost feels a bit like a Saturday Night Live caricature has stumbled its way into a deathly serious and plodding drama. The film might’ve meant well, but it’s overdone on an acting front and then undercooked on all the other fronts, leaving Judy thoroughly unsatisfying and frustratingly dull in just about every way.
6
‘Mommie Dearest’ (1981)
With Mommie Dearest, it is a worse film about a famous actress than Judy, but it’s also the kind of bad that makes it more engaging – at least in bursts – than the drab and overall more tedious aforementioned film about Judy Garland. The central figure in Mommie Dearest is Joan Crawford, though things are seen from the perspective of Crawford’s adopted daughter, Christine, who wrote the memoir upon which Mommie Dearest was based.
Mommie Dearest is the kind of thing you can flip back and forth between admiring, finding hilarious, and being bored by.
The film is a feature-length excuse to let Faye Dunaway chew a lot of scenery, and she herself is a pretty forceful and sometimes hammy actress who is playing the also bold, uncompromising, and sometimes hammy Joan Crawford. It’s either great casting, or a total nightmare of too muchness, or maybe somewhere in between, as in the kind of thing you can flip back and forth between admiring, finding hilarious, and being bored by. It’s a dark film thematically, but the execution is very camp in a way where it’s hard to tell how much – or if any – of the comedy was supposed to be intentional.
5
‘The Iron Lady’ (2011)
The Iron Lady is one of three movies that contain an Oscar-winning Meryl Streep performance, and it’s easily the worst of them. Streep is better in both Kramer vs. Kramer and Sophie’s Choice, and those are overall much stronger films, too. Admittedly, they’re not super comparable, beyond all the movies in this trio being “dramas,” since The Iron Lady was the only one of the three that required Streep to play a real-life figure: Margaret Thatcher, a divisive U.K. Prime Minister who held that position from 1979 until 1990.
She was to the U.K. what Ronald Reagan was to the U.S., and both leaders had vocal supporters and detractors. The Iron Lady is not terrible because of who Thatcher was or wasn’t, but because it is so very bland, clunky, tedious, and borderline useless. It offers little to no interesting insight into Thatcher or the period during which she led the U.K., and not even Streep really makes an impression. Actually, she does an impression. That’s all it is. She is impersonating Margaret Thatcher. It’s not an interesting performance, and it’s not a good performance. She is great in most movies she’s ever starred in, but not this one. It’s a joke of a film, and not even a funny joke at that.
4
‘Back to Black’ (2024)
This is starting to feel like piling up on biopics about women, but the top 3 in this ranking are back to focusing on men, so along with Wyatt Earp, that’s four about men. And, nice and equally, four about women. More men, actually, since none of the words above have been particularly nice about Michael. It’s good to be all about equality, even when being negative about boring biopics.
Which is lots of preamble before begrudgingly getting to Back to Black, which is a film that has so little worth commenting on beyond the very obvious things that are wrong with it. It doesn’t do Amy Winehouse or her legacy justice, it fades into the background in terms of being boringly biopic-ey, and it exists in the shadow of Amy (2015), which is one of the best, heaviest, and most thought-provoking music documentaries of all time. Just watch that instead, or listen to Winehouse’s actual music. Or both. They’re both much better options than slogging through Back to Black.
3
‘The 15:17 to Paris’ (2018)
Not everyone loved American Sniper, which is easily the most popular of Clint Eastwood’s directorial efforts of the past decade and a half, biopic-related or otherwise, but it looks like Lawrence of Arabia compared to The 15:17 to Paris. This one is about three real-life American men who thwarted a terrorist attack in 2015, and it also stars those three real-life figures, playing themselves.
Criticizing this movie is not intended to take away from their actual heroics, and yes, acting ability does not matter as much as what they were able to do in the moment. But the choice to have these non-actors play themselves backfired, as if you’re judging their acting, it’s not good, to say the least. They stand out alongside various professional actors who appear in supporting roles, and even more distractingly, some of these actors are best known for their comedic performances (like Judy Greer, Jenna Fischer, and Tony Hale). All that, plus a dud screenplay, adds up, and ensures The 15:17 to Paris is a pretty awful film, all things considered (unfortunately).
2
‘Stardust’ (2020)
David Bowie is a monumental enough figure that even just picking out one of his many eras to depict and explore in a film would be a mammoth task. Stardust focuses on his attempts to tour the U.S. right before he adopted his Ziggy Stardust persona, which is a pivotal and likely difficult era to capture even if you’ve got the rights to Bowie’s music and approval from his estate… which Stardust did not have.
So, if anyone ever wants to make a proper Bowie biopic one day, no one is going to be offended about you overshadowing Stardust. But it’s also probably futile to try, especially if you want to capture more than one era of Bowie (and there are so many different eras and personas, not to mention styles of music covered across a decades-spanning career). Stardust was just never really going to work, and it’s weird enough effort was put into it that it technically stands as a finished/released film.
1
‘Gotti’ (2018)
A movie has to be pretty bad to give Battlefield Earth a run for its money as the worst thing John Travolta has ever starred in, but Gotti is pretty darn bad. Battlefield Earth is probably more of an ambitious disaster, which makes it a bit more enjoyable, though Gotti is also clunky enough to be fairly entertaining at times, with Travolta bluntly stumbling his way through a very strange performance as notorious gangster John Gotti.
It’s not a constant source of unintentional comedy, yet there’s enough here to laugh at if, for whatever reason, you’re burned out on genuinely great gangster movies and want to watch some tasty trash. It’s up there (or down there?) as one of the worst crime movies in recent memory, and since it’s about a real-life criminal, it also stands as an all-time bad biopic, too.
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