Entertainment
8 Worst Movies That Were Empty Rage Bait
Rage bait consists of online content deliberately produced to provoke anger, outrage, and scandal in order to generate high levels of engagement. It has become a massive pillar of Internet culture, and sadly, not even the movies have been able to steer clear of rage bait. Indeed, particularly in recent times (when online discourse has become an essential part of a film’s anticipation and reception), it has become increasingly common for studios to make and promote movies in such a way that it’s clear they’re trying to stir a passionate reaction in audiences.
Whether it’s a biopic humiliating a beloved actress, one of Disney’s many live-action recreations of their animated classics, or a sequel that destroys everything that its beloved predecessor stood for, there have been many ways in which filmmakers have engaged in clear rage bait over the years. These aren’t just movies that happened to be bad and happened to anger audiences as a result: They were movies clearly designed from the get-go to incite rage in order to be in the conversation.
8
‘Blonde’ (2022)
Marilyn Monroe was one of the biggest and brightest stars of Hollywood’s Golden Age, an immensely talented actress who still remains one of the era’s most beloved performers. She was also, however, a deeply tragic figure. Childhood trauma, mental health struggles, failed relationships, and notorious exploitation from the Hollywood studio systems all characterized her life. As a result, she’s become one of the most enigmatic and often-explored figures of the era across documentaries, books, movies, and the like. This leads us to Andrew Dominik‘s Blonde, based on Joyce Carol Oates‘ 2000 novel of the same name, a fictionalized account of the life and career of the actress.
In no way is Blonde celebratory or respectful of Monroe. Instead, it feels like a film that shamelessly humiliates her and manipulates her image, resulting in one of the worst rage-bait movies ever made. It’s posthumous tabloid trash in cinematic form, a drama clearly intended to stir up controversy in the way it distorts Monroe’s life with the excuse of being a “fictionalized account.” It’s time to let this beloved actress finally rest.
7
‘Snow White’ (2025)
Disney has been making live-action remakes of their beloved animated classics since the ’90s, but it was following the success of 2015’s Cinderella that the House of Mouse really started to turn this highly-criticized practice into a full-on business model. Disney live-action remakes have been getting lazier and lower-quality as the years have passed, culminating in what many would say is the worst one so far: Marc Webb‘s Snow White.
There are countless ways in which this remake failed the original, and that generated a storm of online hate that led the film to being one of the biggest box office flops in film history. From the controversial color-blind casting of Rachel Zegler and Gal Gadot, to the CGI monstrosities that served as the story’s Seven Dwarfs, to the controversial marketing campaign that made it very clear this remake’s narrative wouldn’t stick very close to the original’s, everything about Snow White felt specifically engineered to generate controversy.
6
‘Mean Girls’ (2024)
2004’s Mean Girls is one of the most beloved comedies of the 2000s, a cult classic that has only gotten better with age. A stage rock musical adaptation of the movie premiered in 2017 to high critical acclaim, and that musical served as the basis of 2024’s Mean Girls. Directed by Samantha Jayne and Arturo Perez Jr. from a screenplay by Tina Fey, who wrote the original musical’s book, the film was met with a lukewarm reception from critics and a fiery swarm of hate from audiences.
The movie itself, though definitely considerably inferior to its predecessor and its source material alike, would have been fine enough by itself. What made it seem like shallow rage bait, however, was Paramount’s marketing strategy. The studio bafflingly decided to hide the fact that the film was a musical, and seeing as the Broadway version of the story isn’t exactly a universally-known sensation quite like the original film is, this meant that many viewers were met with an unpleasant surprise when they went to see 2024’s Mean Girls in theaters.
5
‘The Emoji Movie’ (2017)
The Emoji Movie is one of the worst animated movies of all time, and that’s an almost universally-agreed-upon consensus. It’s not just that it’s visually ugly, or too dumb for anyone over the age of four to find any enjoyment in, or so unfunny that it almost inflicts physical pain on its viewers. It’s the fact that a movie about emojis, corporate slop clearly made to get kids to beg their parents for a phone so they can play Candy Crush, was an entirely broken concept to begin with.
No kind of movie is more deserving of the label of “rage bait” than a cynical, lazy cash-grab with a pandering tone and some of the most shameless product placement of any major-studio film in Hollywood history. Somehow, The Emoji Movie‘s controversy-generating strategy worked: It was a significant box office success, though the years have allowed it to age as one of the most universally hated animated films in the medium’s history.
4
‘Joker: Folie à Deux’ (2024)
Throughout history, many movie franchises have taken a nosedive after the first movie. The Joker duology is one such franchise. Though definitely divisive, it’s an objective fact that the first film was a smash hit and a massive success, garnering 11 Academy Award nominations and becoming the highest-grossing R-rated movie ever at the time (a record since broken by Deadpool & Wolverine). Joker: Folie à Deux, on the other hand… much less of a success. That’s a nice way of saying that it was a total failure that massacred everything that its predecessor had done right.
If there is any pair of DC Comics characters who might have made sense as the stars of a campy jukebox musical on paper, it’s Joker and Harley Quinn. The problems here are that the hyper-pretentious Folie à Deux takes itself far too seriously to be campy, that the version of Gotham that Todd Phillips had built in Joker made zero sense as the setting for any kind of musical, and that the film very clearly made genuine efforts to get people’s feelings stirred up. In the end, this resulted in a major box office bomb.
3
‘Terrifier’ (2016)
Nowadays, horror fans fondly think of the horrifying-yet-oddly-amusing Art the Clown as the face of 2020s slasher horror, but that was only after the success of Terrifier 2 and Terrifier 3. The character actually originated in a 2008 short film, and went on to serve as the main villain of his own feature in 2016’s Terrifier. Whereas its two sequels have been successful in expanding the story, world-building, and character work of the franchise in tons of interesting ways, the original Terrifier is just plainly atrocious.
Misogynistic, boring, awfully acted, visually ugly, full of poorly-executed gore, and with a script that feels like it’s barely a couple of pages long, this controversial splatter horror cult classic has nothing to offer beyond juvenile shock value. It’s a movie that seems like it was designed specifically to annoy, offend, and provoke people, and for the most part, it definitely had its desired effect.
2
‘365 Days’ Trilogy
The erotic thriller genre is one that has produced a number of genuinely masterful films over the years. Netflix’s 365 Days movies aren’t among them. We’re talking about three of the most unwatchable drama movies in history, painfully un-sexy and un-erotic failures that misunderstood everything the genre should be so badly that it’s almost laughable—or it would be, if the movies weren’t so infuriatingly misogynistic from start to finish.
But that’s just the thing: 365 Days rage-baiting misogyny in no way feels incidental. Instead, it feels like the whole point of the trilogy. It’s so painfully obvious that these films were created to stir up controversy and invite hate-watching that it’s almost—the keyword here is once again “almost”—funny. They’re poorly made, amateurish in every sense imaginable, and an all-out affront on the cinematic art form.
1
‘A Serbian Film’ (2010)
A Serbian Film is famous for being one of the most disturbing and traumatizing movies ever made. In fact, that’s the only thing it’s famous for. Using graphic violence and taboo subjects to criticize censorship in Serbia sounds like a smart and honorable enough concept on paper, but there’s definitely such a thing as “too far.” Director Srđan Spasojević goes light years beyond that blurry line, to the point that watching A Serbian Film doesn’t just take a strong stomach: It takes a bit of a masochistic attitude as well.
For a wide variety of reasons too grotesque and provocative to even name, A Serbian Film is one of those movies capable of disturbing pretty much anyone. It’s the quintessential rage-bait film par excellence, a movie made entirely and exclusively to generate controversy and provoke strong negative reactions not just in viewers, but in anyone even aware of the movie’s mere existence.
A Serbian Film
- Release Date
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June 11, 2010
- Runtime
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104 Minutes
- Director
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Srđan Spasojević
- Writers
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Aleksandar Radivojević, Srđan Spasojević
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