Greetings, reader!
This is a fun idea I had a while back! These days, whenever a big movie is released, the online discourse around it seems to be a necessary part of the experience for my generation (I always avoid it like the plague before seeing the film, but dive right into the rabbit hole after seeing it for myself. People who seek out the takes beforehand and enter the movie with a bunch of pre-conceived notions on what to think are a major pet peeve of mine). Anyways, I've noticed distinct differences in the discourse around different films - some get super-messy and summon the loudest, most annoying people in the world to flood the conversation with the absolute worst takes, while others seem to mainly provide a forum for interesting people to share interesting opinions and have an actual conversation about the film. Here is an arbitrarily handpicked selection of some of the biggest and most opinion-generating films of this decade so far, ranked from the least annoying discourse to the most annoying!
18. KPop Demon Hunters (2025)
As huge as this film was, it attracted a remarkably small amount of stupid takes (or then they just didn't find their way onto my algorithms). Mainly it just seemed to be people agreeing that the film was awesome, and I saw exceptionally few "THIS MOVIE IS OVERRATED AND YOU'RE ALL DUMB FOR LIKING IT" takes considering how big the film's hype got.
Usually, the amount of praise goes hand in hand with the amount of people hating on the film no matter how good it is, because a lot of people just have to make everything about seeming smarter than everyone rather than enjoying something. But KPop Demon Hunters managed to be an outlier regarding this phenomenon! The biggest critiques I saw were from KPop fans saying that the film wasn't completely accurate to the culture in some regards, and those were very mild in tone and educational as well.
17. Challengers (2024)
This one was quite a similar case - I reckon that Challengers was saved from obnoxious discourse thanks to the hype around the film not getting too big, even though it was one of the biggest films of 2024. From what I saw, the Challengers discourse largely began and ended at "This movie was awesome!", with cinema-themed content creators on YouTube and Instagram as well as regular people commenting on platforms like Threads all seeming to agree.
Even the within-the-plot discourse, about which characters everyone liked and agreed with and what lessons and takeaways there were to be found, went by quite painlessly. Just two years later, those have most definitely surpassed opinions about the film itself as the biggest source of polarization.
16. The Drama (2026)
With The Drama, there was a lot of discourse and varying opinions - but from what I saw, pretty much all of it was intelligent and interesting. For whatever reason, those specific archetypes of people that often taint the discourse around a film - the one who seems to want to purposefully misunderstand the film, the one who can't agree with anyone about anything but has a need to "win" the discourse by having ultra-hot takes, the one who has zero media literacy but definitely believes themselves to be smarter than everyone - seemed to largely miss this one.
And thank God for that - The Drama is filled with material that could potentially serve as a breeding ground for just the worst, most insufferable takes. After seeing the movie, I was mentally prepared for this, expecting to see stuff like "actually Emma is the villain" and "no, they're ALL right" - but I was delighted to be wrong! Many of the takes I saw were ones I agreed with, whereas others hadn't occurred to me but made me think and expanded my appreciation of the film, and even the ones I disagreed with were well-reasoned and valid points of view. The discourse wasn't nearly as one-note as the two films ranked below this one, but for a discourse filled with a large range of varying takes, this one was healthy and fun.
15. Superman (2025)
Okay, there were shitty Superman takes (as is bound to happen with such a big film) - but compared to many such cases, they were definitely in the minority. As could be expected, the conservative right hated the film, and I saw my share of "oh no, they made Superman woke!" takes - but the hate train died down quickly enough that it never got to the point of exhausting me but rather gave me a good laugh. A vast majority of the discourse was totally awesome - a large portion of people online, at least outside the MAGA bubble, seemed to be largely in agreement: this film was fun as hell!
While debates were had about who had the best performance and how does this rank among DC films, the main take I kept seeing over and over again was along the lines of "Man, it's refreshing as hell to see a movie this genuinely optimistic and unapologetically fun in the Lord's year 2025". The memes were also pure gold - "Watch Superman, a film with the legitimately compelling premise of 'What if a guy was nice?'" pops into my mind and makes me smile every now and then.
14. Sinners (2025)
In a manner quite similar to Superman, this critical darling of 2025 did have its haters, but they were such a small (if loud) minority that they didn't ruin the discourse no matter how hard they tried. For every one "Ugh, why is a film about SINNING winning Oscars in my America?" that I encountered, there were about ten fascinating points about the characters, themes and hidden layers. The film itself was a perfect recipe for fruitful discourse, as there's so much to analyze and unpack. Of course, the film's acclaim got to be so big that it attracted the "actually, it's overrated and you're all stupid for enjoying it" crowd, but even they stayed relatively tame when compared to many similar cases.
13. Tenet (2020)
Now we're starting to get to ones where the discourse was a bit annoying, but not nearly among the worst instances. With Tenet, my only issue with the discourse was how much of it was negative, especially due to a large amount of critiques having very poor reasoning. Look, if you don't like the film, that's perfectly fine, but the Tenet hate seemed so forced - it's like Christopher Nolan had had so many well-received movies in a row, that the internet felt that it's time to turn on him. Most of the negative reviews I saw (and I saw a lot) really gave the vibe that the viewer had walked into the theater having decided beforehand that they won't like the film, and will thus be looking for reasons to nitpick. Other than that, the discourse wasn't too bad though!
12. Oppenheimer (2023)
Two Nolan films in a row! A big chunk of the Oppenheimer discourse was alright - people were having fun with the whole Barbenheimer thing, and the internet was ready to like Nolan again after blowing off some steam with Tenet. However, there was a semi-significant portion of takes that now feel like a precursor to what we've seen a lot more in the last one or two years - due to a combination of factors, we're in a media literacy crisis, which is largely why more and more of the film discourse we see gets flooded with the worst takes.
The case with Oppenheimer wasn't as bad as some, but it wasn't great either - while there were many positive reviews from people who understood what the film was about as well as well-reasoned critiques on how it handled its delicate subject manner, both the positive and negative ends of the discourse also had their share of some truly wild takes. From pro-nuclear-warfare people who liked the movie because all the anti-war subtext whooshed right over them, all the way to people to trashed the film without even seeing it because someone on TikTok claimed that it glorifies U.S. foreign policy, there were some brilliant examples of why we really need media literacy training in the current climate.
11. Barbie (2023)
I swear, both sides of the Barbenheimer coin being ranked consecutively was a pure coincidence! But, yeah - to the surprise of absolutely no one, Barbie had the even more annoying discourse out of the two. I considered ranking it significantly higher, because at its very worst, the discourse got ugly as hell - remember Ben Shapiro's 43-minute rant about why he hated the movie, and all of the other insecure man-babies who got offended by the film? Yeah, that absolutely sucked, and I saw a lot of comments that temporarily tested my faith in humanity.
However, it isn't ranked higher than this, because when I look back on the discourse in its entirety, I see it as a net positive.
Not to take anything away from how worrisome the manosphere hate campaign against this film was, but as much of that content as I saw, there was way more good stuff. I saw some fantastic takes unpacking the different messages and motifs of the film, and a lot of people seemed to be having an actual conversation instead of yelling past each other. The movie had clearly moved a lot of people in many different ways, and seeing how meaningful it was to so many people and how much power viewers found from within was a joyful part of the Barbenheimer summer experience.
10. Wicked (2024) and Wicked: For Good (2025)
My big problem with this otherwise decent discourse was the emergence of a fairly common phenomenon that has become a real pet peeve to me: people take the good parts for granted. Of course, I wasn't familiar with the Broadway musical when I walked into the first film, so it makes sense that elements like the story and songs weren't as big of a deal for OG fans of the musical as they were for someone like me experiencing them for the first time. But still, the musical getting a big-budget cinematic adaptation - and one that got the job done with flying colors - is a big deal, yet after the first month or so, I often felt like I was the only one who felt so.
Instead of talking about things like the intricate set design, the magical atmosphere, the spectacular arrangements, the phenomenal performances and how powerfully the story hit in today's political landscape, a vast majority seemed to take all of that for granted and instead focus on odd nitpicks or going on and on about how the stage version is better (which I believe, but still - you don't watch The Return of the King and constantly remind everyone about how you like the book more). When you look at the amount of continued hype and praise that many of the big movies in the last few years have gotten, I couldn't help but feel sad about Wicked doing so many things right that were hardly mentioned in the discourse.
This also carried into the larger cinematic discourse of 2024 and 2025 - when people who aren't into musical theater were wondering what's so great about the film / calling it overrated / confessing they didn't see it, the demographic who I expected to be defending the film - Broadway geeks - were weirdly quiet and/or neutral, with a whole lot of "yeah, it was alright". I must have seen a different movie than them, because the first Wicked was the best film of 2024 and Wicked: For Good was a top three for 2025 as well. You don't have to agree with that, but still, I was let down by the lack of recognition after the short-lived initial hype.
9. The Odyssey (2026)
None of Christopher Nolan’s films from the 2020’s have been ranked particularly high on this list, as the discourse is always mainly nice - both the main aspects of praise and the main critiques are often well-reasoned ones. However, The Odyssey is clearly ahead of Tenet and Oppenheimer, because the far-right trolls did try their darnest to hijack the discourse.
They didn’t completely take over my algorhithms, as is the case with some of today’s highest-ranked instances, but they were definitely louder and more prominent than with many other films. The discourse has been pretty illuminating if you don’t look at the transphobic and racist reactions to the film’s casting choices, but I do have to include that in my view of the discourse, as I saw so much forced hate being spewed at Elliot Page and Lupita Nyong’o. What a dumb f**king world we live in.
8. Dune (2021) and Dune: Part Two (2024)
Writing this post has made me think about a clear distinction in any given film's discourse: there's the conversation about the movie in its surrounding context (how good it was, how does it rank within that year's movies or that director's catalogue etc.), and the conversation about the stuff within the movie (people who agree with each other over how good the film was, debating what they thought of the characters, events and thematic takeaways). With Denis Villeneuve's Dune, both conversations had a lot of good stuff, but the discourse stayed relevant for so long that it was almost inevitable that the God's-gift-to-the-internet crowd got all over it.
Suddenly, amidst the "This is the best movie of the decade so far!" and "I find it a bit overrated but still, an amazing production" takes, we started to see bullshit like arrogant men going "This is the #1 greatest movie of all time and if you disagree with that it's because you're too dumb to understand it" as well as negative takes that were clearly a reactionary take on the film's hype (hating on something just to be contrarian - a classic).
The same goes for the conversation about the film's substance - for a beautiful fleeting moment, my algorithms were flooded with interesting debates on the politics and morality of various factions in Dune, but sooner or later, the ones with the worst takes became the loudest, ranging from "Paul is the hero" (no he isn't) to "the movie and the original book suck because they play into a white savior narrative" (did I mention we're in a media literacy crisis?).
7. A Minecraft Movie (2025)
Taking things too seriously is a sin that we're all guilty of every now and then - hell, I'm probably committing it right now with this post. But at least I'll never be like the guys who took over the discourse over the f**king Minecraft movie by taking it about a thousand per cent too seriously.
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to find the right take here: like the film or hate it, it's a movie for kids, and Minecraft fans, and particularly kids who are Minecraft fans. And whatever your thoughts on the film are, the film was objectively a success, as millions of Minecraft-loving kids around the world loved it and got tons of joy from it. Now, if you aren't a kid or a Minecraft fan, yet you still watch the film, and don't like it...you'd think that the natural reaction would be something like "well, this wasn't for me". That was my reaction at least - the film was silly and I didn't enjoy it very much, but I could easily imagine how perfect it was for the target audience.
Well, oh boy, a lot of people did NOT have that reaction, instead making the kids' movie all about themselves with long, serious rants about how cinema is dead because a movie for children dared to make some lazy jokes and have clichés in the plot. I've come across many annoying archetypes of people who discuss film online, but pretty much nothing beats "guy who walks into every movie of every genre demanding it to be The Godfather" in terms of pure annoyance.
6. Obsession (2026)
The big horror hit of this year was a hard one to rank here, because to be fair, there was a lot to like in the discourse. I saw many good takes and analyses out there - but there are a few major things that heavily downweighed my enjoyment of the discourse, and more or less inspired me to write this post.
The biggest, most glaring one is the same shit we've seen over the years with Fight Club, American Psycho and Joker: men who don't get the f**king point. Not to spoil too much but Bear, the protagonist of the film, is...not a good guy. Which flew past the heads of a bunch of people. That in itself could still be sort of understood (although definitely worrying) - as an initial reaction, because the film is a lot to take in and many viewers take time to process what they've seen. But alas, for the insecurity that festers in a lot guys is a powerful force to be reckoned with - so, something that I saw a *lot* of on the Internet was people who got the point discussing how fucked up Bear's actions were and how he's the true villain of the story, and a bunch of guys taking that *not* as an opportunity to listen and learn, but rather as something to get pissed off about and start a whole culture war in the defense of a f**king horror movie character.
Also, this isn't nearly as big of a nuisance, but the rhetoric from many of the people who I agree with about the film's substance also got annoying. Like, the message of Bear being the villain and the film being a statement about rape culture is important to get out there, but because the internet is the internet, a lot of people turned having the right take into a f**king Olympic sport - I saw so many people bragging about how smart they are in a way that really goes against the idea that art moves everyone differently - "I knew that Bear was the bad guy from the first 20 seconds, and if you didn't catch the red flags then, you're definitely a TERRIBLE PERSON" et cetera. So much for appreciating the film's nuance and layers. But, like I said, that's far from being the main concern.
5. The Bride! (2026)
This is like if you took the attitudes and elements that made the Barbie and Sinners discourses slightly annoying, but instead of being a loud but small minority, they'd make up a majority of the discourse. I'm definitely biased here as I really liked this film, so naturally the overwhelmingly negative reception hurt my feelings (and before you say "what the hell is wrong with you, why would you take it personally if a bunch of random people don't like a movie you liked", I'm well aware of that being a dumb and unnecessarily stressful trait, but I can't help it. I think it's partially because I have that special kind of overblown empathy that often comes with the autism spectrum where I even feel empathy for a f**king movie as if it's a person with feelings, and partially because those of us who were bullied as kids have this fun little thing where our sense of self-worth is a bit too tied to a whole bunch of weird stuff for the rest of our lives).
Anyways, back to The Bride! - it's not just that people didn't like it. After all, there are plenty of movies that I enjoyed but got generally hated, and while it's always slightly upsetting, it doesn't necessarily mean that the discourse is especially annoying. But with this one, it had to do a lot with why people didn't like it, as a massive majority of negative reviews that I read seemed to reflect an attitude where the viewer didn't give the movie a chance, expected the completely wrong thing from the film and got mad when it didn't meet their self-centered demands. Also, it's directed by a woman and starring another woman in a strong lead role, so naturally a huge part of the film's backlash was riddled with sexism.
The Bride! is just the kind of bold, artistic and genuinely different film that if a man had directed roughly the same movie, the internet would largely be praising it and calling it a cult masterpiece - but when Maggie Gyllenhaal and Jessie Buckley do it, people resort to the "every movie should be The Godfather" school of thought and equate artistic style choices and chaotic humor with a perceived lack of skill.
It reminds me of the Whitman quote used in Ted Lasso: "Be curious, not judgmental". A curious person sees a strange, unique film and assumes that the movie is doing something smart so the viewer wants to process what they're seeing so they can understand it; a judgmental person sees a strange, unique film and their small mind can't comprehend that they'd be the one who isn't getting it, so therefore it's the movie that must be dumb. Christ.
4. Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022)
I get a headache thinking about this one. I like walking into a film with my mind being as tabula rasa as it possibly can - naturally, if I know things ahead of time, they affect my viewing experience, but once the film starts to roll, I try to put all of that out of my mind, because the movie deserves to be experienced as its own individual film, and not purely in relation to the viewer's expectation. And boy, does it often feel like I'm the only one who does that.
Everything Everywhere All At Once was, in my opinion, a really good movie. Some people liked it, some didn't, some think it was the greatest movie of all time, some absolutely hated it - and all of that is fine. It's the type of art piece that divides opinions, and that's kind of beautiful. What really gets my goat about the EEAAO discourse, however, is how over 90% of the discourse I followed had very little to do with the film itself, but rather became completely about people mirroring the film to their own expectations and/or the amount of hype that was currently going on, and clearly thinking that whatever they have to say about the film in relation to what everyone else is saying right now is much more important than what they genuinely thought of the film - and when that happens over and over again, with the discourse lasting a long time, it just becomes a bunch of noise.
I can't fully explain why it was so frustrating, but YouTuber Man Carrying Thing has a great video satirizing the EEAAO discourse. The jist of it is, whenever the film was getting more hype, everyone on the internet seemed to agree that they now need to start hating the film on principle, and when that went on for a while, everyone else on the internet decided that they like the film 100x more than they initially did now that there's a debate going on, and the same whiplash happened over and over again for over a year. This discourse was people vs. people vs. people vs. people vs. people, with the movie itself getting completely lost in the noise.
3. One Battle After Another (2025)
Now we're really getting to the exhausting ones. This is probably the only film on this list where I actually blame the movie itself for the obnoxious discourse, more so than the viewers. Although it probably wasn't intentional, the fact is that in the Lord's year 2025, One Battle After Another feels like it was created in a laboratory to fuel the most insufferable discourse imaginable for the media literacy crisis and political climate we're in.
I mean, it's cinematically well-made enough that it could be called a masterpiece and a deserving Best Picture winner, but also not quite on the level of some films out there (*cough cough*, Sinners, *cough*), so that its accolades can be reasonably argued against even when you take the politics out of it. And oh boy, when you get to the politics of it - the film manages to somehow be so woke and so un-woke at the same time, that it really seems to do its darndest to just piss EVERYONE off (except for the apolitical crowd, who did seem to be its biggest fans).
I mean - on one hand, it's a film where the heroes are revolutionaries fighting against a fascist government, with some pretty clear metaphors to the Trump regime, and it gives a lot of agency to strong female characters and Black revolutionaries. But on the other, the story is centered around a white male protagonist played by Leonardo DiCaprio, while some of the story choices arguably veer on fetishizing Black women, and even the digs at fascism end up coming across as semi-cowardly half measures that don't have much to say (especially when you compare it to some of the bolder political films from the last years).
Now, there were some positive takes and some negative ones that I saw about this film that were well-reasoned and nuanced - but oh boy, were they drowned out by the loud majorities of people who loved it in a black-and-white way while failing to acknowledge its flaws, and people who hated it in a black-and-white way while failing to acknowledge its merits, and these two groups working overtime to purposefully misunderstand each other to the utmost degree. Man, forget about the movie - the real One Battle After Another was the discourse we made along the way.
2. Weapons (2025)
As you may have noticed, most of my gripes with online film discourse have to do with my values and political views beyond cinema - but here is a glaring exception. The Weapons discourse was annoying as hell purely on the level of cinema geeks discussing cinema with other cinema geeks. I still can't quite put a finger on what made this discourse so uniquely frustrating to my taste, but I'll try my best to analyze it here.
It definitely has a lot to do with the film's genre, and the preconceived notions that people have about genres. I've always been a "every genre has good movies and bad ones, so I don't really put any genre ahead of another" guy, so it has always baffled me when people go "I only watch action movies" or "I hate sci-fi" or anything like that. Horror has a unique position within cinema, as it used to be a genre that a vast majority of cinephiles didn't take seriously, and the last few decades have created somewhat of a divide - for some subsections of movie fans it seems to have almost surpassed every other genre, with films like Midsommar and Sinners getting levels of praise you don't really see elsewhere, but then there still are those movie enthusiasts who take themselves too seriously and still aren't into horror - which must be becoming increasingly difficult to defend for anyone who claims to love cinema, as the genre has broken so much amazing ground in the 2010's and 2020's. And the way in which Weapons fits into this phenomenon might just be why I became so livid with the discourse.
For me personally, it was a really good movie, if not a great one - the type that barely misses out on my top 10 of the year but makes the honorable mentions. Following the discourse, it seemed that any interesting thoughts about the movie in itself kept getting drowned out by two opposite groups - horror fans who didn't like this film for whatever reason and considered it very overrated, and people who generally look down on horror but liked this film. I saw tons of comments from both groupings, and both seemed to convey a very unfair attitude when the film isn't discussed on its own merits, but rather like a strange pawn in the commenter's weird relationship to the entire genre.
People from the first group didn't criticize the film because of any actual flaws, but because it didn't meet their exact criteria for what a horror film should be like, and it all ended up sounding like they're just saying "Look, I want to look smarter than everyone else so obviously I hate this very popular horror movie because I actually saw these 10 obscure horror films this year and consider them to be better, so obviously Weapons sucks and I'm very smart" between the lines. And the second group was somehow even more annoying, with the subtext of their take sounding like "Look, I have never given horror cinema a chance before because of some stuck-up attitude, but now this masterpiece is the best movie of the year and maybe the decade, because it does a bunch of stuff that I consider revolutionary even though the same elements could be recognized in any decent horror flick watched by a more open-minded person".
1. Joker: Folie à Deux (2024)
This one genuinely felt like I was being pranked. I felt like I was going crazy, or somehow living in a different dimension than everyone else. It felt like I was the only one who had watched the first Joker, then followed the news as a sequel is announced, and then watched the trailer and read about how the director, producers, stars and overall marketing made it very clear that this sequel is going to be a musical. So, I walked into the cinema, curious to see what a musical sequel to Joker would look like. I'd like to think that even if I wouldn't have known about this style choice beforehand, I would've realized that it's a musical from the first musical number, and then I would've tried to orientate to that idea so that I could enjoy the film, giving it a fair chance.
A lot of people didn't have that experience; Joker: Folie à Deux was one of the most universally reviled films of the year, scoring a 5.2 on IMDB and winning the Razzie awards for Worst Remake, Rip-Off or Sequel and Worst Screen Combo. And in a case similar to The Bride! or A Minecraft Movie, my problem wasn't that people didn't like it - many of my favorite films are generally divisive ones, and everyone is entitled to their opinion. But my problem was the reasoning that people had: after reading tons of negative reviews and angry comments, I have yet to hear *one* criticism about the film where the 'critic' gives the impression that they gave the film a fair chance and walked in with an open mind.
The negative reviews seemed to be about 20 per cent pure misogyny (the first Joker had Joaquin Phoenix as the individual male lead and this sequel had Lady Gaga as her co-star, and one of the main characters being a woman was clearly too much for a lot of insecure men to handle), and about 80 per cent complaints about the film being a musical. Mind you, they weren't comments of substance saying that it was a bad musical, or explaining why the film being a musical was inherently bad - people just were mad that it was a musical. Part of this appeared to be the similar "I don't like this genre" attitude that we see all the time with horror / fantasy / sci-fi from people who simply haven't given the genre a chance....and a much larger part was something even more baffling.
People felt ambushed and attacked by the film's choice of genre. No, I'm not kidding. In a vast majority of negative reviews that I read, there was a recurring theme where the viewer has walked into the cinema expecting a very similar film to the first Joker, and when the sequel turns out to be a musical, they immediately decide that this is the worst film of all time, because how dare they subvert one's expectations like that? Over and over again, I kept seeing comments about the film that blamed false advertising and complained that the film was completely different from what it was supposed to be - and that's the part that made me feel like I was trapped in the Twilight Zone or something.
The film's marketing was very open about the fact that it was going to be a musical. Look, if you don't follow movie news and like go into a film without knowing anything beforehand, that's fine - but people were out there claiming that they've seen the trailers, followed the hype, had specific expectations, but still somehow felt personally betrayed when the movie was the exact kind of movie that had been advertised, because these people had somehow missed the glaring signs or just wanted and excuse to complain about the film. God, thinking about this one gives me a headache - thank goodness it's the last one. Let's hope that no film in the rest of the decade surpasses this one in terms of exhausting discourse.
Thank you for reading! Tune in next week for a big one - the top 100 movie acting performances of all time.
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