You ever get that feeling that no matter how hard you try, everything not only turns out wrong, but seems designed to make life that much worse by its very existence? That’s what the last several months have been for me. Between being unemployed for nearly a year, approaching a phase of literal worthlessness, insulting rejection after insulting rejection, multiple deaths in the family (the funeral for one of which I had to pay for completely out of pocket), and the federal government pulling out all the stops to fuck over millions of people in favor of a tax cut for billionaires (one approved by a single vote in each chamber of Congress), it just feels at times like there was always a plan to take everything away from me. I know that’s melodramatic, but when there’s not only no light at the end of the tunnel, but the tunnel itself is a painted-on trick by Wile E. Coyote meant to make me slam myself face-first into a mountainside, melodrama almost comes off as quaint.
At least I have movies, for whatever that’s worth. But who even knows how long I’ll be able to maintain my tenuous grip on that? Kind of hard to “actually pay” to see something when all the money is gone. I hope I’ll be able to keep this up, but I’ve little to no confidence left in it.
A part of me wonders if it’s even worth it to try, especially when the business model again seems tailor made to destroy creativity and enjoyment. Case in point, look what happened over the last month-plus with Disney. They had two major properties on their hands – the remake of Lilo & Stitch, yet another soulless, pointless recreation of a cartoon with non-human characters, meaning by its very nature it can’t be completely live action; and Elio, a long-awaited Pixar original that had something of a fraught production thanks to corporate interventions, causing it to be delayed by two years due to creative differences between the original director and the studio.
All logic and decency would dictate that the powers that be do everything they can to encourage new voices and thought, promoting the shit out of Elio to make it a success given all the time and resources put into it. At minimum they should have strived to ensure that both films were hits. Instead, the House of Mouse went all-in on the remake, devoting ungodly amounts of marketing heft to get people to shell out money for something they’ve already seen, and left Elio to basically fend for itself. The result? The Lilo remake has made nearly a billion dollars worldwide, $400 million of it domestically, making it the second-highest grossing film of the year so far, while Elio finished third in its first weekend (behind 28 Years Later and another assholic remake, this time for How to Train Your Dragon), the worst ever opening for a Pixar film. Despite tons of critical and audience praise, it’s going to be considered a full-on flop, as it hasn’t even made back half of its budget so far, all but guaranteeing that Disney will be fully committed to sequels only from the preeminent animation studio in this country.
It didn’t have to be this way. This wasn’t just bad luck. This was a choice. Those who controlled the situation actively chose to make Lilo again in the first place, and then release it on what was basically a non-competitive weekend (it went up against Mission: Impossible, but those are two totally different audiences with little overlap) and advertised the hell out of it to make sure it turned in an obscene profit, while at the same time underplaying Elio and burying it. They engineered its failure. Just like the politicians who take glee at the number of people they will financially ruin and eventually kill through their cruel cuts and largest upward wealth transfer in American history – one that even their own voters begged them not to do – Disney knew the consequences of their actions and opted for the result that was objectively wrong, because the point was always to suppress independent thought and eliminate anything that didn’t precisely conform to them getting richer. It doesn’t matter how many suffer in the wake, because as long as these people are completely insulated from any consequences, they win.
There is only one cure for this. We all have to stop going to the movies we know shouldn’t exist, the ones that are bad, the ones that are nothing more than cynical cash grabs. And we have to constantly tell our friends and family not to go either. We can’t just Luigi Mangione these fuckers. We have to hit them where it actually hurts – their wallets. Because God knows I don’t exactly have the means to take in everything I can like I normally do. I don’t even know if I’ll be able to afford to keep up regular coverage on this blog beyond this month. Five years ago it took a global pandemic to stop me for a while. This time it might just be the fact that apparently I’m not even qualified to work at a fucking Target.
This column was designed to identify projects that didn’t look like they were worth your time and money, and right now I’m the one who most needs to heed my own advice. So as we go through this list of trailers, I beg of you, really pay attention, really understand how precious your movie dollars are, and spend them wisely, because there’s a calculable chance I won’t be able to give you these cheeky warnings next month.
This is the July 2025 edition of “This Film Is Not Yet Watchable!”
Jurassic World Rebirth – July 2
“None of what you just said is good.” Scarlett Johansson says this towards the end of the trailer, but honestly it could stand as a meta disclaimer for the entire preview, and by extension, the picture itself and the franchise writ large since 1997.
Just over three years ago we got Dominion, advertised as the last film in the Jurassic series. It was a massive critical disappointment, because for the second straight time audiences were outright lied to about the story, and once again we were placed in a boring jungle with dinosaurs chomping on random cannon fodder no one cared about, just with the monsters being bigger.
But since enough people still made it through the doors of their local cinemas before they realized the lie, Universal made enough money to renege on their own premise and reboot the series AGAIN, this time bringing in Gareth Edwards to direct after the wholly ill-advised pro-AI disasterpiece that was The Creator, and bringing back original screenwriter David Koepp. That last part might seem like a good idea, but remember that Koepp also wrote The Lost World, so the whole “T-Rex in San Diego” thing was his fault. He did get eaten by said T-Rex though, so, happy endings all around. Koepp’s output is decidedly hit-and-miss, as he’s given us the likes of Carlito’s Way, the first Spider-Man film, and the first Mission: Impossible. However, he’s also penned the last two Indiana Jones movies, Kimi, Mortdecai, and the Tom Cruise Mummy. Essentially, the man constantly gets work because he’s friends with Steven Spielberg and he does whatever the studio tells him to do. It does not guarantee actual quality.
So what do we get as our reward for being duped once more? Well, we switch out our generic military villains for big pharma, we go to yet another jungle island, which was apparently the research facility that’s never been mentioned until now, and it’s home to the dinosaurs deemed “too dangerous” for the actual park, meaning they’re bigger and badder than anything we’ve seen before. In other words, IT’S THE SAME GODDAMN THING WE’VE SEEN IN EVERY SINGLE SEQUEL IN THIS SERIES!
Oh, and just as a “fuck you” to people who enjoy legit terror and thrills, one of our heroes is named Dr. Loomis, clearly a reference to the Halloween films, in case you needed a reminder of what you could be watching instead.
Heads of State – July 2
I kind of love how the ending text says “New Original Movie,” when this is clearly a ripoff of every action flick cliché of the last 40 years. I mean, even the moment where John Cena and Idris Elba first shake hands you’re mentally thinking of the meme of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Carl Weathers locking arms in Predator. The very premise of the film seems to be based entirely on the fever dream hypothetical when Dwayne Johnson announced he might run for President, mixed with all the fanboys who’ve been clamoring for Elba to be the next James Bond for the past decade. Well, at least on that last point, Amazon owns the franchise now, so maybe this is his audition. God help us all if it is.
Three more notes: One, don’t use the Crüe’s name in vain. Two, stop reminding us that Priyanka Chopra married a Jonas brother. Three, never put the two together, or you risk destroying the very notion of music by joining two forces so opposed that it creates an auditory black hole.
Madea’s Destination Wedding – July 11
Now’s as good a time as any to remind you all that Tyler Perry is one of the reasons why my industry is in the shitter, and why I haven’t worked in nearly a year. Ever since he opened his studio in Atlanta, he and others have been dangling tax breaks and lax regulations as incentives for productions to move, and the rich assholes at the top have been all too happy to oblige. Netflix also gave him a shit-ton of money he doesn’t need to make movies exclusively for their platform, and this is the sixth so far. So fuck him.
Now’s also a good time to remind you that this is the 13th film to feature the Madea character, with the previous 12 having a Rotten Tomatoes average of 26%, and the only one to pass the basic line of 60% for “Fresh” status was I Can Do Bad All By Myself, which got to 62% (contrasted with Boo 2! A Madea Halloween, which only rated a dismal 5%). Essentially, every film this character touches is pure unadulterated garbage, and yet people keep handing Perry money. So again, fuck him.
Most importantly, now’s a great time to remind you that Tyler Perry is currently being sued for sexual harassment, battery, and assault by a former employee. The salaciousness of the allegations notwithstanding, the case spotlights an open secret about Perry’s business model for the last two decades, namely operating without a human resources department or basic labor guardrails in place, so that he can intimidate and prey upon anyone he wants. And yet, networks and studios fall over themselves to give him more money. So again I say, with full throat, FUCK TYLER PERRY! If there’s anyone who deserves to be tossed out of this industry and never work again, it’s him.
I Know What You Did Last Summer – July 18
No! Fucking NO! Just stop it! Fucking stop it! Are you truly that bereft of ideas that THIS is getting a legacy sequel/reboot? Are you serious? The first one barely turned a profit and has a 48% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, the second one flopped and only has an 8% rating, and the third was so terrible that it didn’t even get a theatrical release, and it sits in the fabled land of films that have a 0% rating. In what universe is this justified? No one liked the original, no one is nostalgic for it, and just the sight of poor Jennifer Love Hewitt having to say the “roll credits” line in the trailer is so painful that it’s literally overriding the headache I have right now to cause EVEN MORE PAIN!
There are exactly two quotes in this preview that make sense, but only in a meta context. One is a returning Freddie Prinze Jr. shouting, “It’s not going to stop!” This is Sony we’re talking about, so yeah, that tracks. If there’s any whiff of an IP they haven’t milked like a cow with distended teats, they’ll shove it down our throats forever. The second is the film’s alleged protagonist sighing, “I need to start drinking.”
Same. Can’t we just watch the Simpsons parody and be done with this?
The Fantastic Four: First Steps – July 25
There aren’t too many entries this month, not because everything looks good, but because the tentpole releases are even more monopolized than usual, with basically every weekend featuring one major debut and everyone else but the indie studios getting out of each other’s way for maximum profit all around. There are only 19 eligible films for me to look at for July, and several of them are for streaming services rather than theatres.
This is arguably the biggest of the bunch, give or take James Gunn’s Superman, and I’m sorry, I just don’t care anymore. The Marvel Cinematic Universe is dead at this point. Nearly all fun and creativity have been sucked out of it, and we’re firmly in the table-setting phase for the next Avengers two-parter to end this so-called “Multiverse Saga.” Because we’ve known for years where all this is going, I can’t even get behind the potential entertainment value of having a parallel Earth where modern day tech is mixed with a 1960s aesthetic.
None of it matters because, as the title implies, this is just a step towards a larger end, in this case the absolutely gobsmacking introduction of Robert Downey Jr. as Dr. Doom for the finale of this phase of the MCU. That means the threat of Galactus is null, the presence of Shalla-Bal as the Silver Surfer feels even more shoehorned and unnecessary than the actual Rise of Silver Surfer movie, and the overarching refrain of “family” rings hollow because the quartet will eventually be subsumed into the splash page shot of dozens of other characters when we get to the climactic battle two years from now, to say nothing of the nauseating cribbing from the Fast and Furious series.
It’ll make a ton of money because Disney has been hyping it for months, to the point of overshadowing the marketing for other MCU entries over the last year. Hell, it might even be good enough (it’s hard to go wrong with Pedro Pascal and Vanessa Kirby in your cast) to warrant the ad blitz, but I just can’t muster the energy to give a crap.
Happy Gilmore 2 – July 25
The original Happy Gilmore was not a good movie, but it did have three elements that were undeniably great: Christopher McDonald’s Shooter McGavin as the villain, the late great Carl Weathers as Happy’s trainer, and the fight with Bob Barker. So what does this film offer? McGavin in a cameo, a ham-fisted “son” for Weathers’ character who also has a wooden hand, and Happy fighting everyone because Bob Barker is also dead.
This looks like a very tired and sad series of callbacks and product placement. Seriously, before you see a single person other than Adam Sandler, you see logos for Subway, Adidas, and a handful of other sponsors. The goofy hotheadedness of the title character is gone, replaced by a bullshit desire to pay for his daughter’s “ballet school,” because the focus groups say that an ambitious girl character is good, but she can have absolutely zero flaws. The way Sandler repeats back the “pieces of shit for breakfast” line, arguably the most memorable hallmark of the original, has all the grace and passion of a colonoscopy with no lube.
Like so many legacy sequels before it, no one was asking for this. No one needed to check in with Happy Gilmore 30 years later to see that despite winning millions as a pro golfer, he’s still a loser. And most importantly, no one wants to see the same plot beats repeated over and over again. There’s a degree of comfort in watching something familiar, but this is just lazy. And given that it’s coming out on Netflix, it’s not like the original isn’t easily accessible if people do want to revisit those 90s chuckles. Think of all the wonderful and imaginative projects that were denied funding to make this happen, and you’ll completely understand my current bout of depression and despair.
The Home – July 25
A horror movie about a haunted/psycho nursing home filled with homicidal senior citizens? Normally that would be just kooky enough to work. Unfortunately, The Home has several red flags from just the trailer, listed below:
- Lionsgate
- Pete Davidson
- Pete Davidson as our protagonist, meaning he’s meant to survive all this terror
- “From the creator of The Purge“
- “From the producer of Halloween (the awful 2018 reboot trilogy)”
- Jump scares, enough to trigger the “Jump Fail” protocol within the trailer itself
- Pete Davidson again
Yeah, hard pass.
Oh, Hi! – July 25
Immediate disqualification for having THAT title and having no one in the movie named Mark.
Also, it’s a shitty rom-com where a couple goes on vacation, only for the guy to break up with the girl at the mention of them being a pair. That automatically makes him an asshole, but instead of just going their separate ways, the girl leaves him handcuffed to the bed and brings in her friends to include them in the idiotic conspiracy of what to do with him. So everyone’s an asshole! Oh I so hope great things happen to them and they all end up happy! They totally deserve positive outcomes! I haven’t been on a date since before my mother died two years ago!
The movie debuted at Sundance this year, and has a 72% rating from its festival run. This implies that it’s good, but not great. The fact that it’s being buried by being put up against Fantastic Four tells you just how much confidence Sony has in it. They’re going to actually try to WIN the previous weekend with the Last Summer reboot, but this is getting shunted off to the side. If I had to choose, I’d pick this 10 times over, because it’s at least a somewhat novel concept rather than a recycled IP, but just like with Disney as mentioned above, the people in charge have made a conscious decision to quash anything different in favor of sameness. This will fail massively.
Osiris – July 25
Really, Linda Hamilton? I know Dark Fate sucked copious ass, but did you really need to do THIS as your rehab assignment?
I mean, let’s just list off the clichés, shall we? Sky portal and beam? Check. Killer aliens? Check. Terrible accents? Check. Disposable side characters? Check. Grimy alien ship? Check. I’d say this is a ripoff of Romulus, but that’d be giving it too much credit. We’re firmly in Doom territory here, and not the awesome video game. I’m talking about the Dwayne Johnson movie that denigrated it. And this is without even picking apart the opening text of a “Classified” location that gets lit up like a fireworks display on the 4th, meaning anyone would be able to pinpoint that exact spot and thus render the text as bullshit.
Man, everybody really is just offloading their worst properties to get obliterated by Fantastic Four, aren’t they?
***
And now, as we always do, we scrape the absolute bottom of the barrel, “The Worst Trailer in the World!” This month’s “winner” is a rare case, in that I picked it months ago. Normally I wait until I watch every preview to choose the candidate, but this one was such a no-brainer that it was hardly worth even considering anything else. Hell, for the first time ever, I made the video before I bothered watching the others. That’s how bad this is.
Smurfs – July 18
You know you’re creatively bankrupt when your entire film is premised upon a nightclub soundtrack even though neither the Smurfs nor the kids watching them would ever go clubbing, and using the “Smurf” insert as a substitute word for swears. How do I know they’re using it to cover swears? Because if they meant anything else, they’d have just said the normal word. In the comic strip and the cartoon, “Smurf” is used as a catch-all for random nouns, verbs, and adjectives. The point is that there’s no rhyme or reason to it, and it’s often contextualized by emphasizing the various language around it. Here it’s clearly just a way to pretend to cuss while still getting a PG rating.
Also, why do so many lazy kids films overload the cast with A-list celebrities? I harp on Rihanna’s casting in the video, but why in God’s name do we have Nick Offerman, Nick Kroll, John Goodman, James Corden, Natasha Lyonne, Sandra Oh, Octavia Spencer, and Hannah Waddingham? None of the children who would watch this knows or cares who these people are, so why would Sony spend so much money when normal voice actors would get the job done just as well? The only member of this cast that makes sense is Alex Winter, aka Bill S. Preston, Esq. Outside of the Bill & Ted movies, he doesn’t really have a profile, because he stopped acting in the 90s to pursue producing and directing work, which is perfectly cromulent. Having him in a throwaway, do-nothing voice role is likely fine, because it’s just an extra paycheck he can cash to fund whatever passion project he’s got on deck. But all the others? What could they possibly hope to gain from this? Even their own kids won’t give a rat’s ass that they’re in it.
Although the trailer doesn’t really show it, a good chunk of this movie takes place in the real world, with live action cinematography. I’m hoping and praying that this means it won’t be eligible for Animated Feature next year, because Lord Almighty help me if I have to watch this for completist reasons.
***
With that, it’s time to end things on a glimmer of hope with the “Redemption Reel.” Because I need an extra boost, it’ll be a double this month. Two films coming out in July, the month we Americans celebrate our nation’s independence, have quite dour stories, but they feel like they might be essential given where we stand at the moment.
Sovereign – July 11
Eddington – July 18
It’s a palpable ironic tragedy felt by myself and tens of millions of others that next year will be the United States’ 250th birthday, and that milestone will be overseen by a President who embodies the worst impulses of humanity and represents a complete lack of progress from the wealthy slave owners who founded it. And that’s assuming the country still stands as a free state, because Donald Trump and his modern-day Gestapo are doing everything in their power to turn us into a violent authoritarian dictatorship akin to Nazi Germany.
These two films show the possible nadirs of that extremist vision. In Eddington, we have a crazed populist sheriff played by Joaquin Phoenix using his badge as permission to stir up unrest during the COVID pandemic against a utilitarian mayor (Pedro Pascal) in small-town New Mexico, exploiting civilian paranoia and lighting a powder keg in Ari Aster’s latest creepy work. It currently has a 67% rating on Rotten Tomatoes after its run at the Cannes Film Festival, where it was nominated for the Palme d’Or (it lost to an Iranian film called It Was Just an Accident, which will be interesting to see given that country’s turmoil at the moment). Maybe it’ll split the difference between Hereditary and Midsommar. I’m certainly curious to see where it goes.
With Sovereign, you have Nick Offerman traveling the country espousing the anti-government rhetoric of the “sovereign citizen” movement, a batshit, illegal theory that people can simply declare themselves exempt from any laws and statutes to which they do not personally consent. Offerman takes his son, played by a now adult Jacob Tremblay (they grow up so fast) on this trail of conspiratorial lawlessness with apparently very violent and tragic results, given that this story is based on the 2010 West Memphis shootings that left two police officers dead.
Both of these movies show what happens when delusional men with guns are not only left unchecked, but actively encouraged in their behavior so long as they hate the same people you do. Given Offerman’s involvement, it also offers, in a meta sense, a pathway to how we get to Alex Garland’s Civil War, where Offerman played an authoritarian POTUS in his illegal third term declaring martial law to maintain his grip on power. As depressing as these stories appear on a thematic level, we need them as clarion calls to the people. Show the history of what’s already happened, either directly or through artistic license, to warn and shine a light on the very dangerous road we’re going down right now. Bad Disney remakes might be “safer” for audiences, but they’re little more than placebos. They may be profitable, but they also encourage a willful ignorance that only helps the oppressors. We need people to see movies like these two in order to raise a collective cultural awareness. That’s what the film industry has always been about. It’s not just storytelling, it’s a statement on the human animal at any given moment, equally an indictment of where we are and an aspiration to what we can be. The more people we can get to understand that, the better off we’ll be in the long run.
Also, if we keep watching this stuff, assholes like Tyler Perry will have less and less influence.
***
That’s all for this month, folks. Hopefully I’ll be able to keep this going through August and beyond. Fingers crossed. As always, I hope you enjoy yourselves no matter what you go see, even if it’s the crap mentioned above, and be sure to take care of one another. Most of the time, we’re all we’ve got.
Join the conversation in the comments below! Do you plan to see any of these films? Was I too hard on any of them? How exactly does a Smurf use auto-tune? Let me know! And remember, you can follow me on Twitter (fuck “X”) as well as Bluesky, subscribe to my YouTube channel for even more content, and check out the entire BTRP Media Network at btrpmedia.com!
I Actually Paid To See This 