The mid-year flop list: Screen Large’s pick of the 2026 worst films so far, with Netflix stuff, animals, AI, washed-up killers, and some truly bizarre stories.
After kicking off with a halfway look at the year’s best movies, it’s time to turn attention to the titles that have irritated, frustrated… the editors, from the start of 2026. This is a must-read (you know you love it), because flops are really an opportunity to dive a little deeper into the year’s worst films (even if we can’t cover every single one).
After consulting the staff, Screen Large has assembled its top 10 list of the worst films of 2026 (as of now), without distinguishing between theatrical releases, streaming titles, or those dumped out on VOD-DTV… Because, honestly, today’s clunkers appear on every screen.
Note: The 10 films on the list were released in France between January 1 and June 30, 2026.
Secondary note: The ranking is in order of their French release dates, otherwise the team would still be arguing.
Guilty as Charged
- Release: April 29, 2026
- Runtime: 1h58
What’s it about? In a near-future where justice is outsourced to a supposedly flawless AI, a detective is accused of murdering his wife. He’s got only 90 minutes to prove his innocence—and to prove that this film isn’t a total dud.
Why it’s an instant skip : Two members of the team had the misfortune of watching Guilty as Charged, and the opinions range from “this is a colossal mess and one of the year’s worst, I’m done with this world” to “this thing is as forgettable as a bowl of undercooked white rice.” The formula was daunting: director Timur Bekmambetov (Wanted, Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter, Ben-Hur), Chris Pratt, and a concept that’s basically “The Fugitive and Minority Report… but with an AI”, all wrapped in a Screenlife style (where everything unfolds on screens).
Instantly dated, Guilty as Charged leans on the worst effects and the laziest “twists” (the hero is framed for a crime impossible to guess! the AI isn’t sure of itself, and when it “feels” something it glitches!), as if someone thought a Grok version of Internet Pursuit would be a good idea. It’s clearly silly, with zero thoughtful engagement about AI, justice, and the world, and it’s painfully dull. Fortunately it flopped at the box office.
Scream 7
- Release: February 25, 2026
- Runtime: 1h54
What’s it about? Sidney Prescott is back on the dance floor and Ghostface is itching to kill her again. Basically the same pitch that’s driven the franchise for two decades, give or take a few tweaks.
Why it’s no longer viable : Scream 7 almost didn’t happen, with the baffling removal of Melissa Barrera, followed by the departures of Jenna Ortega and director Christopher Landon. In a perfect world, the franchise would have been buried forever. But Paramount and Blumhouse needed cash and revived the saga by bringing back Neve Campbell as Sidney Prescott, with money in hand.
The result is a disaster. The series had struggled to renew itself since its 2022 comeback with Scream 5 tried to mimic “elevated horror,” and the sixth entry aimed to shake things up with a New York setting. Scream 7 leans into nostalgia, but instead recycles cliché-laden horror tropes that feel dated. Beyond a slack, formulaic plot, the final reveal is so stupid—almost lazily stacked—that it makes you wonder if the franchise should end.
Bad news: the film somehow became the franchise’s biggest hit, and a eighth installment is already in motion. We’re already sighing.
Return to Silent Hill
- Release: February 4, 2026
- Runtime: 1h46
What’s it about? James receives a letter from his wife Mary, who is long dead, asking him to join her in Silent Hill. The hype even claimed it would adapt the game Silent Hill 2.
Why it’s unbelievably awful : What happened? How did Christophe Gans, who delivered the solid 2006 film Silent Hill, produce something this half-baked, torn between clumsy “this is a misfire” vibes and outright sloppy storytelling? A lower budget doesn’t excuse this incoherent wreck that tries to adapt Silent Hill 2 while tacking on a pile of unnecessary elements—most notably around Mary, who’s turned into a ridiculous, loud Silent Hill totem, with a slew of unnecessary flashbacks.
Return to Silent Hill ends up juggling a nightmare of directions, trying to satisfy both the game’s fast-paced symbolism (the Pyramid Head onslaught, Eddie’s blink-and-you-miss-it appearance) and the new, equally awkward additions (the psychologist narrating to the audience as if someone forgot to entertain the audience). The fog lifts, the town is lit up, and it’s handled all wrong. We’re left waiting for someone to actually explain what happened in this film (Christophe Gans, we’re here for a two-and-a-half-hour video interview if you want, seriously).
Jumpers
- Release: March 4, 2026
- Runtime: 1h45
What’s it about? Using a groundbreaking device, Mabel slips into the body of a beaver to talk to animals she adores. It’s a chance to stand with them against the destruction of natural habitats (or maybe not).
Why it’s a colossal mess: The pre-Toy Story 5 Pixar-esque project by Daniel Chong aimed to feel like a green tale, but Jumpers will be a political drag the day “lukewarm water” becomes a cocktail. There’s nothing salvageable here, as it abandons any attempt to emotionally move and instead makes noise and thrashes around to attempt a few laughs—and maybe fails again.
Not only does Jumpers mimic Pixar’s storytelling and emotional beats in a messy way, it’s also a film full of political hypocrisy, turning its heroine “rebel” into a caricature of Macron-esque capitulation to capitalism (redundant). Your kids deserve better than this lecture in capitalist resignation.
Super Mario Galaxy: The Movie
- Release: April 1, 2026
- Runtime: 1h39
What’s it about? Mario saves a princess. To reach her, he must endure a retrospective tour of his entire career.
Why it’s a… Mamma Mia: Super Mario Galaxy is clearly a pure money grab. Released immediately after the first film, it came out as quickly as possible to cash in on its enormous box office. In the scant time they had (imagine the level of modeling and animation work on a project so technically pristine!), the writers could have avoided panic.
Instead, in the rush, they crammed in Nintendo easter eggs and vaguely connected the dots. Consequently, the result feels as empty as a Goomba’s brain. The characters even verbally reference the games they’re nodding to, just so you’ll click to buy Nintendo Store merch in real time. The worst part is that, unlike the first film, it doesn’t have fun with the Mushroom Kingdom’s rules. The Mario Kart sequence from Super Mario Bros. ends up resembling the final showdown of Mad Max: Fury Road beside the franchise’s most action-packed moments in Super Mario Galaxy.
Predator Nature
- Release: April 10, 2026 (on Netflix)
- Runtime: 1h23
What’s it about? As a catastrophic hurricane pounds a coastal town, several survivors try to outrun sharks patrolling the flooded streets.
Why it’s magnificently forgettable : It’s one of those “officially official but painfully empty” titles that you’ll have to name with a new word for low-budget disaster flicks. Here you’ve got a pregnant woman trapped in a car half-submerged among sharks, three kids perched on furniture in a flooded, shark-gnawed house, and Predator Nature somehow fails to deliver any genuinely amusing or suspenseful moments. Everything moves far too fast, never pausing to exploit the situations to their full potential.
Result: this sub-Crawl wears out its welcome at 1h23, and you’ll likely switch to vacuuming or reading Screen Large’s review instead—the smarter move. You’re right, because we watched it attentively for science, and the dwindling goodwill vanished at the terrible finale. Time to rethink the agent for actor Djimon Hounsou.
Michael
- Release: April 22, 2026
- Runtime: 2h08
What’s it about? The life and the career of Michael Jackson, the biggest pop icon in history.
Why it’s a bad move : The press faced heavy criticism for targetting Michael Jackson’s life so aggressively, riding on tabloid sensationalism. But years after his death and his reign over pop, this biopic, launched by Graham King to cash in on the Bohemian Rhapsody formula, does him no favors.
Like many artists, his genius came with eccentricity and a singular persona. When he turned to cinema, the results were even more original in their own way. Understanding his music means confronting his flaws, his media relations, and his fans—rather than turning his story into a glossy Hollywood success story, neatly jukeboxed with hits.
Michael, the film, tells you nothing about Michael Jackson’s life. It reduces him to a promotional cardboard figure, the publicity campaigns that caricatured him, all under the watchful eye of John Branca, the Michael Jackson estate’s longtime representative, depicted in the film as a caricatured guardian and whose relationship with his client has been rocky at times.
Parallel Histories
- Release: May 14, 2026
- Runtime: 2h19
What’s it about? A novelist starts writing a new book inspired by the lives of her neighbors. But when her fiction intrudes into their reality, the line between truth and imagination gets blurred.
Why it’s a little catastrophe : The idea promised Hitchcockian drama à la Rear Window with a sonic game in the spirit of Blow Out and a perverse edge worthy of Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom. The prospect was juicy, especially with Asghar Farhadi and his brother Saeed handling the writing, capable of incisively exploring micro-fissures in daily life to expose class, relationship, and truth fractures.
At first, Parallel Histories opens with theoretically fascinating lines about art, imagination, and the power of stories in general. But once the fiction—the product of imagination—invades reality, the narrative loses its compass, twisting between truth and fiction, fantasy and concrete fact. The early doll-house structure of parallel tales mutates into one sprawling, nested story that spirals into confusion and nostalgia’s trap. Even a stellar cast can’t pull this out of the void.
Saccharine
- Release: June 3, 2026
- Runtime: 1h52
What’s it about? A young woman grapples with her weight by taking pills made from human ashes. The remedy seems effective, but it appears to summon a malevolent presence…
Why it’s exactly what you shouldn’t do : The latest film from Natalie Erika James, who previously delivered the impressive Relic, Saccharine feels like the director panicked at the scripting stage and merely slung together a potpourri of ideas instead of developing a few into something substantial. It’s another entry in the “woman transforms her body with a strange ingredient to be beautiful for the world—and pays the price” trope, recycled to dull effect.
Unlike Relic, whose angle gave it a real edge in the horror-on-aging genre, Saccharine lands squarely in the low rung: it can’t even articulate a clear point, let alone say anything meaningful. If its message is about fatphobia and the pressure to slim down, that irony isn’t intentional or effective.
Scary Movie 6
- Release: June 3, 2026
- Runtime: 1h36
What’s it about? The historic heroes of the franchise face off against their parodic Ghostface once again.
Why it’s far too heavy to be funny: Even with nostalgic blinders, maybe it’s time to admit that the Scary Movie franchise never had much to offer. It never reached the over-the-top energy typical of ZAZ, who themselves struggled after taking the series back on board from its third entry.
This is the first misstep of Scary Movie 6: its legacy-quel vibe comes not from the return of Anna Faris, Regina Hall, or Ghostface, but from the Wayans brothers (Marlon, Shawn, and Keenen), who had their creative control taken away by Weinstein. In addition to staging their resentment in a lunar finale that feels like a private joke, the film presents itself as a comeback for comedy geniuses who aren’t actually being geniuses.
That Wayans reunion, approved before Paramount and Skydance merged, fits perfectly into the current reactionary stance of the studio. The few jabs at Trump and Elon Musk don’t fool anyone in this sea of nonsense, where the new guard is essentially pushed aside by the franchise’s true owners.
