Before we begin: calling a film "overrated" doesn't mean it's bad. It means the gap between its reputation and its actual quality is wide enough to park a bus in. Some of these films are good. A few are even great. But none of them are as great as the internet, the Academy, and your film school mate with the Criterion Collection tote bag would have you believe.

I'm going to get hate for this. That's fine. The comments section exists for a reason.

Avatar (2009) - The Most Forgettable Highest-Grossing Film Ever

Avatar made $2.9 billion at the box office. It was a technological revolution. James Cameron spent a decade developing new camera systems, new 3D projection technology, and new motion capture processes. And the story he chose to tell with all this groundbreaking innovation was... Pocahontas with blue cat people.

Quick: name three characters from Avatar. Not the actors - the characters. Jake Sully, obviously. Neytiri. And then... the villain? Was it Colonel something? Quaritch? Maybe? The point is that the highest-grossing film in cinema history left essentially zero cultural footprint beyond "that blue film with the 3D." No quotable dialogue. No iconic characters. No meaningful impact on popular culture despite billions of people watching it.

Compare that to Star Wars, Jaws, or Jurassic Park - films that similarly dominated the box office and also fundamentally changed how people talked, thought, and played. Avatar was a theme park ride disguised as a film: spectacular in the moment, evaporated by the car park.

Bohemian Rhapsody (2018) - The Wikipedia Biopic

Rami Malek won an Oscar for this, and honestly, his performance is the one element that deserves its reputation. Everything else is a paint-by-numbers biopic that sanitises Freddie Mercury's life into a tidy three-act structure while getting numerous facts wrong.

The timeline is mangled to create a redemption arc that didn't exist. The portrayal of Mercury's sexuality is weirdly coy for a film about one of the most flamboyant performers in rock history. The Live Aid recreation is technically impressive but feels like karaoke rather than revelation. And the band members who served as consultants ensured that nothing too uncomfortable made it past the editing room.

A genuine Freddie Mercury film would be dangerous, sexual, complicated, and devastating. Bohemian Rhapsody is a greatest hits compilation with a thin narrative wrapper. It's fine. It's pleasant. It's not remotely worthy of the extraordinary life it claims to represent.

Crash (2004) - The Worst Best Picture Winner

There's a strong argument that Crash winning Best Picture over Brokeback Mountain is the single worst decision in Oscar history. Paul Haggis's film about racial tensions in Los Angeles treats racism like a networking event - everyone's connected, everyone learns a lesson, and by the end, the audience is supposed to feel enlightened rather than challenged.

The problem is that Crash's version of racism is entirely interpersonal. It's about individuals being mean to each other, not about systemic structures that perpetuate inequality. Its thesis - "everyone's a little bit racist" - is both facile and weirdly comforting for white audiences who get to nod along without examining anything structural.

It won because the Academy wasn't ready to give Best Picture to a gay love story. That's the uncomfortable truth. Crash made Academy voters feel progressive without requiring any actual progressiveness. It's a film about racism made for people who want to feel like they've engaged with racism without doing any of the work.

Forrest Gump (1994) - Conservative Comfort Food

Deep breath. Forrest Gump is a technically proficient, beautifully acted, emotionally manipulative film that presents a deeply troubling worldview: that the key to success in America is being unquestioningly obedient, politically incurious, and too intellectually limited to challenge the status quo. Every character who questions authority - Jenny, Lieutenant Dan, the anti-war protestors - is punished. Forrest succeeds by doing what he's told.

Tom Hanks is extraordinary in the role. The visual effects that insert Forrest into historical footage are genuinely groundbreaking. Alan Silvestri's score is gorgeous. But the film's message - that ignorance is bliss and compliance is virtue - is deeply conservative propaganda wrapped in a chocolate-box aesthetic. It beat Pulp Fiction and The Shawshank Redemption for Best Picture, which should be classified as a war crime against cinema.

Try saying this at a dinner party. Watch what happens.

The Greatest Showman (2017) - Propaganda for a Fraud

The Greatest Showman transforms P.T. Barnum - a real-life con artist, animal abuser, and exploiter of disabled people - into a plucky underdog fighting for inclusion. It's like making a feel-good musical about a payday loan shark. Hugh Jackman is predictably charming, the songs are catchy, and the film is so aggressively feel-good that questioning it feels like kicking a puppy.

But the real Barnum kept an enslaved elderly woman named Joice Heth as an exhibit, claiming she was 161 years old and George Washington's former nurse. When she died, he charged people to watch her autopsy. Turning this person into a singing, dancing champion of diversity is historical revisionism so brazen it would make Stalin blush.

Titanic (1997) - Three Hours of Waiting for the Boat to Sink

Yes, Titanic. The second-highest-grossing film of all time (until Cameron topped himself with Avatar). Winner of eleven Oscars. Cultural phenomenon. And, if we're being honest, about ninety minutes too long and built around a romance between two characters who have the emotional depth of a paddling pool.

Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio are charismatic. The sinking sequence is genuinely harrowing and technically masterful. But the first half of the film is a rich-girl-meets-poor-boy romance so predictable you could set your watch by each plot beat. "Draw me like one of your French girls" is iconic not because it's good writing but because it's the most quotable line in a film notably short on quotable dialogue.

Cameron's genius is in spectacle, not character. His films work when things are exploding, sinking, or chasing. The quiet moments in Titanic - the romance, the class commentary, Billy Zane being cartoonishly evil - are serviceable scaffolding for the main event. The problem is that the scaffolding takes up two-thirds of the runtime.

La La Land (2016) - A Musical for People Who Don't Like Musicals

Damien Chazelle's candy-coloured love letter to golden-age Hollywood is beautiful, sincere, and - here's where I get in trouble - not particularly good as a musical. Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone are charming but limited vocalists performing in a genre that traditionally requires vocal powerhouses. The musical numbers are pleasant rather than thrilling, competent rather than transcendent.

The film's real achievement is making people who normally dismiss musicals feel cultured for watching one. It's a musical with training wheels - just enough singing to qualify, not enough to alienate an audience that would never watch Singin' in the Rain. As a romance, it's affecting. As a visual experience, it's gorgeous. As a musical? Compare it to the films it references - The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, An American in Paris, Top Hat - and it shrinks considerably.

It also nearly won Best Picture in the most embarrassing ceremony cock-up in Oscar history, which feels cosmically appropriate for a film whose entire aesthetic is nostalgia for a perfection that never existed.

American Beauty (1999) - The Bag in the Wind

Sam Mendes's debut was hailed as a searing critique of suburban ennui. Rewatched in 2026, it's a film about a middle-aged man's sexual obsession with a teenager, presented as a spiritual awakening. Kevin Spacey's Lester Burnham is treated as a sympathetic rebel figure, but strip away the Thomas Newman score and the plastic bag metaphors, and he's just a bloke having a midlife crisis while perving on his daughter's friend.

The "it's about seeing beauty in the mundane" reading holds up if you squint. But the film's gender politics are dire - every female character is either a controlling shrew, an object of desire, or both. The bag-in-the-wind speech, once considered profound, now reads as the pretentious navel-gazing of a character the film should be interrogating rather than endorsing.

It won Best Picture over The Sixth Sense, The Insider, and The Green Mile. Context doesn't make it better.

Why "Overrated" Matters

Calling something overrated isn't trolling - it's quality control. When we collectively agree that certain films are untouchable masterpieces, we stop critically engaging with them. We stop asking whether they've aged well, whether their politics hold up, whether they're actually as good as we remember or just as good as we've been told to remember.

Every film on this list has genuine merits. Avatar's technology was revolutionary. Forrest Gump's performances are masterful. Titanic's spectacle is unmatched. But merit and reputation are different things, and when the gap between them widens, someone needs to point it out.

That someone is me, and my inbox is open for abuse. Come at me.

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