While reflecting on the highs and lows of a year past, we’ll admit it’s best to stay positive. We’ll also admit it’s fun, in a masochistic sort of way, to ruminate a while on the more dismaying events of the past 12 months. Because movies tend to fall somewhere on the scale between “good” and “bad,” not everything that came out this year made it into everyone’s favorites.

So let’s give in to our worst impulses and highlight not just the bad stuff, but the stuff that was just really, really disappointing. It’s easy enough to decide on what was bad, and normally the truly bad stuff never really has any hope of being good. It being bad, then, doesn’t come as a surprise. But the disappointing stuff almost hits worse — mainly because there was so much potential for it to have been better.

For this list, those are the movies we’re working with, the ones with promising premises, beloved directors, a killer cast, and/or fantastic source material to work from. And yet, for whatever reason, none of these things was enough to make them good, and our excitement to see them quickly died a few minutes in, when we realized, uh oh, what have they done? We’re not saying you aren’t allowed to enjoy these, but we are saying that they were bad (or even merely okay) when they should have been great.

READ MORE: The Best Movies of 2024