It features a well-known star as the main character, a big studio, and an epic title.
However, since its July 25 premiere on Amazon Prime Video, “War of the Worlds” has been a ratings disaster.
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Rotten Tomatoes, a review aggregator website, named the new rendition of H.G. Wells’ novel as one of the worst movies ever made.
Ice Cube plays Homeland Security surveillance and threat assessment specialist Will Radford in the movie. During an extraterrestrial invasion, Radford uses government technology to spy on and later assist his children. Throughout the entire movie, Radford is seated at his desk, watching events play out on a computer screen.
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The film, which was directed by Rich Lee, also stars Eva Longoria, Michael O’Neill, Olivia DeLaurentis, and Clark Gregg.
The science fiction film has a pitiful 3% rating on Rotten Tomatoes’ “Tomatometer,” which tracks reviews from critics, and 21% on the “Popcornmeter,” which tracks reviews from viewers.
War of the Worlds is ranked 88th on Rotten Tomatoes’ list of the worst movies ever made. No. 1 is the science fiction thriller Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever from 2002. Sylvester Stallone’s Alarum is the only other 2025 film to be included on the list.
“War of the Worlds” received a certified fresh ranking from just one critic, Entertainment Weekly’s Jordan Hoffman, who wrote, “It’s certainly stupid, but it’s also a great deal of fun.”
The majority of others characterized the movie as the worst adaptation of Wells’ 1898 novel about the invasion of Earth by Martians. The 1938 CBS Radio broadcast, directed by Orson Welles, the 1953 Technicolor movie starring Gene Barry, and the 2005 Steven Spielberg film starring Tom Cruise are examples of previous adaptations.
One critic on Rotten Tomatoes claimed that Lee “butchers the classic sci-fi parable on humankind’s colonialist ills and creates an obnoxiously dull, utterly braindead (ritual bootleg) exercise in capitalist, surveillance state propaganda.”
Some people commented on the internet that they thought the movie’s tagline, “It’s worse than you think,” aptly captured how they felt about the film.
The response has not been officially addressed by Lee or the cast.
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Requests for comment were not answered by the movie’s distributor, Amazon Studios, or producer, Universal Pictures. (NBC Universal, the parent company of NBC News, owns Universal Pictures.)
However, the response to “War of the Worlds” has also made it popular, as is the case with certain other movies that get bad reviews.
Although Ice Cube’s performance in War of the Worlds is frequently ridiculed, YouTube film critics’ thumbnails actually feature these response shots.BGuESwrbPR pic.twitter.com/
A lot of viewers have turned Ice Cube’s responses in different scenarios into GIFs and memes.
The movie has established a position in the Know Your Meme database.
According to the website, a July 21 post on X by user PoorOldRoloTony, who published a movie clip, is responsible for the increase in online traction. War of the Worlds (2025), according to the user, is the poorest adaptation of the original work to date. It didn’t have any concepts outside of the found footage method. As of Tuesday, the post had received 1.9 million views.
The acting, dialogue, simplistic gadget hacking, and overbearing messaging concerning widespread government surveillance and conspiracy theories have all been ridiculed by users on TikTok and X.
A TikToker said in the text of their video, which included a scene from the movie, “It sounds like Ice Cube is reading straight from a script that he had never seen before.” 1.1 million people have watched the video.
Ice Cube’s response to his character’s son’s death was one of the “cringiest moments” from the movie that another TikToker selected.
The year’s best film?#icecube#funny#cringe#movies#top5 #waroftheworlds
One TikToker went so far as to record themselves dressed like Ice Cube and reciting lines from the film.
The movie’s use of Amazon merchandise has also drawn criticism from some viewers. Examples include sequences in which a character receives a $1,000 Amazon gift card and a Prime Air delivery drone.
One of the primary reasons the movie is ranked among the top 10 worst movies of 2025, according to Vetz, a YouTube channel that rates and reviews films.
“I’ve never seen such terrible product placement in my life,” claimed Joel, a reviewer for the 261,000-subscriber channel.
The movie had an average rating of merely one star from the approximately 90,000 users who registered as having seen it on the well-known movie tracking website Letterboxd.
“A 90-minute commercial for an Amazon service that will never leave the pilot stage,” a commenter commented. “Amazing item. Hardly a film. Strongly advised.
