Has 2024 been the ultimate year for bad movies?

There's a certain joy to bad movies, isn't there? Not watching them, obviously. That's miserable. But there's a real pleasure to sitting with your friends afterwards and indulging in the shared feeling of WTF after a true cinematic turkey.

It feels as if the year 2024 has allowed that indulgence more than most. This year has delivered a bewildering array of properly terrible movies. Every year has its share of disasters, but in 2024 it feels as if those disasters have been bigger, louder, and more expensive.

Things got off to a pretty awful start. Early February saw the release of two of the worst movies in recent memory: Argylle and Madame Web. The first of those, Matthew Vaughan's twist-happy spy caper, was a star-studded exercise in narrative incoherence. It was sold on the basis of an enormous plot twist around "the real Agent Argylle", but then bungled that entirely in favour of even more rug-pulling.

By the time it concluded with some oil slick ice skating and an outrageous reference to the Kingsman franchise, it had lost pretty much any potential fans it might have won.

Madame Web, meanwhile, was a very curious affair. While the Venom franchise has managed to achieve box office success and a cult fanbase, other entries in the "Sony makes Spider-Man movies without Spider-Man" universe have struggled. Madame Web, starring Dakota Johnson as a paramedic who gains the power to see the future, very much struggled. Within about a week of its release, its stars were making jokes at its expense on Saturday Night Live.

The film emerged as a bizarre mess, clearly massively retooled in post-production. Pretty much every line of villain Ezekiel Sims' dialogue seemed to have been re-recorded in post, while teases of young Spider-Women in their costumes proved to be just that: teases that never came to fruition. That universe is set to return later this year with Kraven the Hunter — a movie that, let's face it, could go either way.

Read more: Madame Web star blames "internet culture" for the Sony Marvel movie flopping (Total Film)

This ignominious February double bill was followed up in April by the Netflix comedy Unfrosted. The feature directorial debut of comedy legend Jerry Seinfeld should've been a huge deal, but the result was a lacklustre fictionalisation of the invention of Pop-Tarts.

Then came summer and, while multiplexes were thankful for the success of Inside Out 2 and Deadpool & Wolverine, they were forced to screen Borderlands to mostly empty screening rooms. At a time when video game adaptations are on the up, Borderlands was a reminder that movies based on games can be uniquely terrible. Summer ended with another blockbuster disaster when the long-gestating remake of The Crow turned out to be a gloomy snoozefest.

Read more: Borderlands review: This Cate Blanchett video game adaptation is a total disaster (The Independent)

Throughout this time, horror fans have had it particularly bad. Studio horror turkeys have stumbled in with alarming regularity, from Night Swim and Tarot earlier in the year to August's dismal AI-based chiller Afraid. I haven't even plucked up the courage to watch Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey 2, so I can't speak for the quality of that one. But my hopes are not high.

This all goes to show, though, that our perceptions of a year in movies are often skewed by the high-profile hits and misses. The summer of 2023 was able to bask in the glow of Barbenheimer, which meant nobody was paying attention to the crop of turkeys that arrived around the same time. Of course, it's also the case that there's simply fewer movies around in 2024, given the lasting impact of the strikes that took place last year in Hollywood.

Read more: We Knew 2024 Box Office Would Be Bad. But Not This Bad (IndieWire)

But instead of revelling in the misery, we should end this piece by celebrating some of the under-appreciated gems of the year so far. Late Night with the Devil was a genuinely scary horror movie. Love Lies Bleeding gave us another tremendous Kristen Stewart performance. Tom Hardy and Austin Butler simmered through homoerotic tension in The Bikeriders. Abigail was a crowd-pleasing vampire thrill ride. The Beekeeper was Jason Statham's best, silliest actioner in years.

Yes, it seems as if 2024 has seen a greater number of high-profile stinkers than other recent years. The month in which the biggest pair of releases in cinemas was Argylle and Madame Web was a tough time to be a movie fan. But it's also true that there's plenty of brilliant stuff out there if you're willing to dig a little deeper into your streaming catalogue or look beyond the two biggest releases at the cinema.

It might be fun to dissect a bad film with your friends in the pub, but it's even more fun to discuss a genuine hidden gem.