The pandemic has meant that a lot of people are spending a lot of time at home without many entertainment options. They’re not going to sporting events or concerts or movie theaters, and in many cases their kids aren’t going to school.
One thing they are doing is watching lots of movies online, and often doing so with their kids. Almost two years into the pandemic, they’ve probably seen a lot of the good ones already. And what does that leave? The not-so-good ones.
To help people make informed decisions about what to watch next, 24/7 Tempo has compiled a list of the worst G-rated movies of all time, and from that list picked the very worst one.
In the words of the Motion Picture Association, G is for General Audiences, meaning there is nothing in theme, language, nudity, sex, violence or other matters that the ratings board thinks would offend parents whose children view the picture. That may not sound like a lot of fun for the grown-ups, but it doesn’t necessarily mean a movie is bad.
This is the G movie you may want to avoid, however, or leave until after you’ve watched everything else, or watch with low expectations. Some people might even want to watch them because they’re described as so bad. Taste is subjective and some things are so bad they’re almost good.
One thing to note is that a lot of these movies on our finalist list are sequels, which often get worse and worse with each installment in a series.
To determine the worst G-rated movie ever made, 24/7 Tempo developed an index based on several measures from the Internet Movie Database and Rotten Tomatoes. Only films with G ratings were considered. The index is an equally weighted composite of the movies’ IMDb rating, Rotten Tomatoes audience score, and Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer score. Only films with at least 25,000 reviews on IMDb, 5,000 audience reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, and 10 Tomatometer critics reviews were considered. Data was collected mid-March 2022.
Many of the films we looked at are geared at younger audiences would be disappointing to watch for the first time today as an adult, but they hold considerable nostalgia for those who saw them years ago as children. Pokémon was a massive cultural sensation, but the first three Pokémon movies were dragged by critics.
However, the list of terrible G-rated movies we reviewed isn’t entirely made up of children’s movies. Though today G-ratings come with the connotation the films are for kids, this has not always been the case, and several older movies here focus on more mature topics. A John Wayne war movie and several sequels to “The Planet of the Apes” are also amongst the worst G-rated films ever made.
The worst G-Rated movie is The Jungle Book 2 (2003). Here are the details:
> Genre: Adventure, Animation, Comedy
> Director(s): Steve Trenbirth
> Starring: John Goodman, Haley Joel Osment, Tony Jay, Mae Whitman
The sequel to Disney’s “The Jungle Book” came nearly 40 years after the original and was criticized for having a very similar plot to the first film. “This inferior rehash of The Jungle Book should have gone straight to video,” according to the Rotten Tomatoes critics consensus.