Worst Films of 2025 (So Far): From 'Game Changer' to 'Nadaaniyan' & many more

Let’s be honest, 2025 has not exactly been a banner year for Indian cinema. It has, in fact, been a buffet of bad decisions, overcooked ambitions, and underwhelming storytelling. Theatres have echoed with not applause, but audible sighs. And in a year where mediocrity became the mean, picking the worst of the worst is... well, a talent. So here we are. Presenting the films that made us question our life choices.

Game Changer

Ram Charan teams up with Shankar, and on paper, it looks like a grand slam. But in reality, it’s a fever dream of confusion. This film is a cultural buffet that gave indigestion, a messy mashup of Indian and Nayak that never finds its footing. It wanted to be a game changer, but ended up pressing the self-destruct button on the console. Grand visuals, generic drama, and storytelling that feels more like a highlight reel than a movie. Watching this feels like being stuck inside a very expensive PowerPoint presentation with transition effects turned on.

Emergency

Kangana Ranaut was confident. Too confident. Playing Indira Gandhi, she went full throttle in acting, directing, producing... and forgetting that nuance exists. The result? A historical drama with the emotional depth of a Wikipedia article. Indira Gandhi might actually be relieved she's not around to see this. It’s filled with dramatic stares, overwritten monologues, and strange camera angles that scream “importance” but whisper “student film.”

Hisaab Barabar

January began with a whimper, and this R. Madhavan starrer did not help. Honest attempt? Sure. Formulaic? Absolutely. The film trudged on with the predictability of a Google Maps reroute. One could guess the ending by the time the popcorn cooled down. A film best filed under "Meh." Madhavan’s performance is sincere, but the screenplay could have been generated by a bored chatbot. Add in slow pacing and you’ve got a snoozefest that forgot to even try.

Bobby Aur Rishi Ki Love Story

Missed this one? Don’t worry, so did everyone else. Kunal Kohli’s comeback turned out to be a lesson in cinematic invisibility. The film tried to be a charming romance, but instead it felt like a late-2000s rom-com that no one asked to reboot. Not even the nostalgia factor could save this one. With chemistry levels so low they could be measured in Kelvin, this film sank without a trace.

Mere Husband Ki Biwi

With a name like that, you know chaos is coming. And not the fun kind. Arjun Kapoor and Rakul Preet seem utterly lost, like they wandered onto the wrong set and just kept going. Bhumi Pednekar has a blast, clearly, but in a parallel universe where the film is actually coherent. It wanted to be madcap, but ended up just mad. The comedy is forced, the plot is a zigzag with no destination, and the dialogues seem borrowed from early 2010s WhatsApp forwards.

Nadaaniyan

If you haven’t heard of Nadaaniyan, congratulations on protecting your peace. The debut of Ibrahim Ali Khan and Khushi Kapoor was meant to be grand. It ended up being meme fodder. The dialogue, the acting, the plot, all entered a witness protection program. And social media has not stopped clowning on it since. It has become the go-to punchline of film circles. A debut disaster that might take years to recover from.

Sikandar

Salman Khan returned... again. But this version of Bhai seemed to be cosplaying as his own parody. Sikandar had the soul of Race 3 and the intellect of Radhe. There was action, sure. But emotional depth? Narrative logic? Human facial expressions? Missing. It’s time Bhai gets a reinvention, not a retread. Even the slow-motion walks look tired. At one point, you wonder if the editors just looped an old film and added a new background score. Maybe Galwan will be that film.

The Bhootnii

Sanjay Dutt in a horror comedy? That sentence alone is terrifying. Add bad VFX, lazy scares, and a story stitched together with the subtlety of a WhatsApp forward, and you get The Bhootni. It's haunted, alright, by bad decisions. This might be the scariest thing Dutt has done since his mullet in the 90s. Ghosts appear, disappear, and sometimes moonwalk. The scares are laughable, the laughs are scary. Truly genre-bending. Just not in a good way.

Odela 2

Tamannaah Bhatia looked fierce in the teaser. The film promised fire. What we got was a soggy sparkler. The story meandered, repeated itself, and then repeated itself again, just to make sure we were bored. A sequel that didn’t need to exist, to a film that no one really remembered. Dialogue that feels like it's being recited in sleep and a climax that forgets it is one, Odera 2 is a masterclass in how to dilute tension.

Kesari Veer

Sooraj Pancholi was everywhere pre-release. Interviews, photoshoots, reels. Sadly, none of that effort made it to the script. Kesari Veer had ambition, scale, and visuals, but no emotional connect. It’s like someone built a luxury car with no engine. Pretty to look at, but going nowhere fast. Even the patriotic background score can’t save it from collapsing under its own weight. A history lesson that feels like detention.

Housefull 5

It made money. It made people laugh. But why? HOW? Logic died, and this franchise threw a party over its grave. Every joke felt like it was written during a sugar crash. The plot was a fever dream stitched together by punchlines and pratfalls. It might be a hit, but it’s still one of the worst films of the year. Justice for brain cells. Each scene is a meme trying too hard, and the ensemble feels trapped in an endless loop of “louder is funnier.”

Thug Life

You see Mani Ratnam and Kamal Haasan in the same sentence and expect cinematic magic. What we got instead was... confusion. Ambition on paper, but chaos on screen. Thug Life felt like an essay that started strong and ended in gibberish. The title is apt, though, it really did thug our time. The aesthetics are there, but the emotions? Lost in translation. A grand reunion that deserved better material.

Kannapa

The latest entry to this hall of fame. Lavish scale, star-studded cameos, mythological weight. But when the execution is this poor, even the gods look away. It tries to say everything, but says absolutely nothing. Like listening to someone monologue in a language you don’t understand for three hours. Spiritual themes meet visual clutter, resulting in a cosmic headache. Despite its celestial intentions, it never leaves the stratosphere of mediocrity.

2025 has taught us a valuable cinematic lesson: Big names, big budgets, and big ambitions mean nothing without coherent storytelling and characters that make you care. Many of these films could have been great. Some were doomed from the title itself. But all of them had one thing in common, they made us want to walk out, log out, or black out.

And while we survived this half of the year, barely, we now wait with fingers crossed and expectations cautiously low. If Bollywood was bingeing on bad scripts in the first half, may the second half go on a cinematic detox. Please. Our eyeballs have suffered enough.

Which film do you think doesn't deserve to be on this from the names mentioned? Apart from that, let us know which are the names you felt deserve to be on the list but were skipped? Let us know in the comments below.

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