"I Can't Believe It Got Made Then, Much Less Now": 33 Movies That Aged Worse Than Milk On A Hot Summer Day

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25-03-2025

A while back, Reddit user mnightshamalama2 asked r/moviecritic about movies that have aged poorly, and there were a LOT — ranging from the '80s right up until just a few years ago. Here are some people can't even stomach watching in 2025.
1. 1988's Big, starring Tom Hanks, which has a romantic plot revolving around a child (in a grown man's body) with an adult woman:
"It's super creepy with the romantic interest and implied sex. And then when Tom Hanks turns back into a kid, the adult girlfriend drops him off near his house and watches him walk home."
— u/downhillderbyracer
"Aww, she just fucked a 13-year-old in a man's body, then watched him turn back into a 13-year-old…"
— u/fasting4me
2. 1994's Blank Check, which includes an FBI agent in her twenties kissing a child:
Walt Disney Pictures / Via youtube.com
3. 2017's The Greatest Showman, which paints P.T. Barnum, played by Hugh Jackman, in a way better light than he deserves:
" The Greatest Showman is a wonderful musical movie that immediately falls apart if you know anything about how much of a piece of shit PT Barnum was. Like most of the movie is totally decoupled from reality, so why is Hugh Jackman playing P.T. Barnum specifically? Why not make a name with a similar cadence so that the whole movie is clearly fictional? E.G. Tartan would be a totally fine name for this fictional inspirational circus ringleader."
4. 1994's Milk Money, which includes a sex worker (played by Melanie Griffith) showing preteen boys her bare chest:
" Milk Money (1994), where preteen boys pay a sex worker (Melanie Griffith) to see her topless. She goes along with it, and then one of the kids tries hooking his Dad (Ed Harris) up with her. If genders were reversed, it would never be shown again."
— u/No-Building-3798
"It was creepy when it came out; now it's another level of messed up."
— u/Coffeecupsreddit
5. 1995's Dangerous Minds, which is just a massive white savior movie starring Michelle Pfeiffer as a teacher in a disadvantaged community:
"I was at a cabin with a bunch of VHS movies, and we picked Dangerous Minds. It was some more white savior bullshit. The part that got me was when Michele Pfifer's character was confronted by the mother of some of the kids, saying something along the lines of, 'My kids don't need no school! They gots bills ta pay!'"
— u/superanx
6. And 2011's The Help, starring Emma Stone and Viola Davis, which centers on a white woman in a story about Black maids in the South:
7. 2001's A Beautiful Mind, starring Russell Crowe, which is just extremely inaccurate:
"A Beautiful Mind is basically a hit piece on John Nash and did him dirty. Basically, most of the stuff they used to portray him as out of his mind was not factual in any way. No, he didn't see invisible people... for fuck's sake, man. If you rewatch it now, it is wild it won Best Picture."
— u/drawkbox
8. 2015's Stonewall, which completely erased the role of trans people and BIPOC in the Stonewall riots, replacing them with a cisgender white man played by Jeremy Irvine:
9. 2016's Me Before You, which stars Sam Claflin instead of a disabled actor in the leading role, and also has a super problematic message:
" Me Before You has the underlying message that you are better off killing yourself if you are disabled with a non-disabled partner because ending your own life is the romantic thing to do. ... Disabled actors still suffer a lot of prejudice and rarely get cast in roles where disability is not the storyline, and yet non-disabled actors took most of the disabled roles."
— u/Imaginary-Mammoth-61
10. 2011's Crazy Stupid Love, starring Steve Carell, which ends with a 17-year-old giving a 13-year-old her nudes:
"For the most part, the movie's alright — not great but alright — but holy shit, the ending. How was that allowed? In the movie, there are a bunch of different love triangles. ... Steve Carell's children's babysitter, who is 17, is in love with him, and his son, who is 13, is in love with her. Steve Carell doesn't know she's in love with him, so to get his attention, she takes nudes. This is already fucking weird for a movie, but here's where it goes from fucking weird to illegal. At the end of the movie, when Steve gets back together with his wife in this standard rom-com format, the kid goes and talks to the babysitter. They have a parting moment, and she gives the kid her nude photos to look at. Keep in mind she's 17 in the movie, and he's 13. And Steve Carell and his wife are fine with it. I'm like wtf, how did Chris Hanson not appear and make them take a seat?"
— [deleted]
11. 1999's American Beauty, which stars Kevin Spacey as he develops a sexual obsession with his daughter's teenage friend:
"Kevin Spacey seduces a teenager who was more talk than she was action and ultimately was unprepared for an adult relationship. Yeah…"
— None
"The plot point about Kevin Spacey being mistaken as a closeted gay man that preys on teenage boys is too on the nose."
— nbwoodelf
"I tried watching that twice in the last year, but I couldn't get past the first quarter of the movie. I keep hearing what a great movie it is, but I'm not feeling it."
— u/Comfortable-Owl-5929
12. 1999's American Pie, which features sex crimes played for laughs:
"When they filmed the exchange student undressing, they were creating child sex abuse images."
— u/reckless-ryean
"A friend and I watched this movie recently, excited to relive it after watching it as teenagers. When they set up that webcam to spy on Nadia, we were fucking mortified. I genuinely forgot about that movie and looking back now, good lord is that scene fucked-up. Not just the child sex abuse images, like you said, but the utter violation of her privacy. Gross."
— u/Positive_Laugh6946
13. 2016's Passengers, which features a man (played by Christ Pratt) accidentally waking up on a 120-year-long trip to another planet, then condemning a female passenger (played by Jennifer Lawrence) to the same fate by waking her up as well because he's lonely:
"Chris Pratt forces Jennifer Lawrence to wake up from induced sleep meant to get her to a new planet and condemns her to spend the rest of her life with him as there's no way to put her back to sleep. Then she falls in love with him anyway, even after she finds out what he did."
— u/Unusual_Resident_784
"It's a great premise…for a horror movie."
— u/zorionek0
14. 1984's Revenge of the Nerds, which uses a rape scene as a triumphant moment for a main character:
15. Similarly, 2005's Wedding Crashers, which includes a scene where Gloria (played by Isla Fisher) rapes Jeremy (played by Vince Vaughn):
16. 2011's Horrible Bosses, which also plays male rape for laughs when it comes to Jennifer Aniston and Charlie Day's characters:
New Line Cinema / Rat Entertainment / Via youtube.com
"The female boss sexually harasses Charlie Day's character, and we're supposed to think it's funny because she's Jennifer Aniston, and she's hot."
— u/Xalbana
17. 2000's Dude, Where's My Car, starring Seann William Scott and Ashton Kutcher, which has a bunch of racist moments:
20th Century Fox /Courtesy Everett Collection
"I still love this movie despite it all, but I showed it to my best friend, who's Asian, with her younger brother. I felt so embarrassed to have hyped up the movie so much; I definitely didn't catch all the racist remarks because I just looked at it like a goofy movie. It opened my eyes in a bad way."
— u/pombasion
18. 1994's Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, starring Jim Carrey, where the villain (played by Sean Young) turns out to be a man living as a woman to escape capture by the police...leading to this moment when Ace realizes he kissed a man:
Morgan Creek Productions / Via youtube.com
— u/Cthulus-lefttentacle
19. 2003's Anger Management, starring Jack Nicholson and Adam Sandler, which is just offensive all around:
Columbia / courtesy Everett Collection
"I'm frankly a little horrified that I ever found Anger Management even slightly amusing. It's sexist, anti-gay, and treats sexual assault like a joke. That film is fucking disgusting."
— u/LordCamelslayer
20. 2009's 17 Again, starring Zac Efron, which includes multiple scenes of a teenager unknowingly trying to seduce her own father (who is in a 17-year-old's body):
New Line Cinema / Offspring Entertainment / Via youtube.com
"A 40-year-old goes back to high school, and his own daughter tries to hook up with him…no thanks."
— u/BoldNorthMN
21. 2010's The Switch, starring Jason Bateman and Jennifer Aniston, where a man switches in his sperm for his friend's chosen donor's sperm, leading her to get pregnant with his child instead:
Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures / Via youtube.com
"Bateman's character fathers Aniston's character's baby without her knowledge/consent by replacing the donation sperm she uses to self-impregnate with his own. The movie plays as a romcom, and I can't believe it got made then, much less now."
— u/pheboglobi
22. 1995's Heavyweights, which is about a children's weight loss camp:
Richard Cartwright / Buena Vista Pictures / Courtesy Everett Collection
"Not in the same vein as a lot of the others mentioned, but Heavyweights was a 90s DISNEY movie about a kids 'fat camp' starring Ben Stiller, and in today's body-positive times, I feel it wouldn't have been received the same way."
— u/mountlax12
23. 1995's While You Were Sleeping, which is about a woman (played by Sandra Bullock) pretending to be a comatose man's fiancé:
Hollywood Pictures / Caravan Pictures / Via youtube.com
"Getting fake-engaged to a vegetable is creepy. Keeping up the charade and nearly tricking him into marrying you for real after he wakes up is downright rapey. Then you get engaged to his brother whom you've known for all of 1-2 weeks? That's only marginally better. Also, it's set in Chicago, but you only see 2-3 Black people in the entire movie."
— u/Ms_Rarity
24. 2000's Road Trip, which features a man trying to intercept his sex tape with another woman before his girlfriend sees it...and has lines like this:
The Montecito Picture Company / Via youtube.com
"The plot is very dated. It is still a favorite of mine."
— u/K-Toon
25. 2006's Lucky Number Slevin, starring Bruce Willis, Lucy Liu, and Josh Hartnett, which is just constantly casually anti-gay:
The Weinstein Company LLC/Courtesy Everett Collection
"I just rewatched Lucky Number Slevin, and it's pretty jarring how casually anti-gay the main characters are. I can still enjoy the movie to a certain degree. But woof. Very bad in retrospect."
— u/themilkywayfarer
26. 1987's Overboard, starring Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell, which has a wildly problematic premise:
MGM/UA Distribution Co. / Via youtube.com
"A rich married woman falls off a boat and gets amnesia. Her husband takes the opportunity to pretend he doesn't know her. Kurt Rusell shows up at the hospital, claims her as his wife, and then takes her home to help raise his four kids."
— u/Modredastal
27. 2005's Hitch, which stars Will Smith as a major creep:
Columbia Pictures / Via youtube.com
"It's still held up as a cute romantic comedy, but Hitch is just fricken creepy. The first scene involves kidnapping a dog and pretending it gets hit by a car to trick a lady into liking the guy who 'saved' it. The whole movie's creepy."
— u/TvAzteca
28. 2009's (500) Days of Summer, which unfairly paints Summer (played by Zooey Deschanel) as the villain even though Tom (played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is clearly in the wrong:
Fox Searchlight/Courtesy Everett Collection
"Horrible movie. Joseph Gordon-Levitt's character is a proto-incel."
— u/yourfriendkyle
"I loved that movie when I was younger. The older I get, the more I realize how Summer was upfront about what she did and did not want, but Tom kept trying to force her into what he wanted. He even has the nerve to try and make it seem like she mistreated him and his feelings."
— u/Remy149
29. 1999's Never Been Kissed, where a teacher falls for a student (played by Drew Barrymore) not knowing she's 25:
Fox 2000 Pictures / Via youtube.com
"Never Been Kissed is about a teacher essentially grooming a student and then is angry with her when she isn't a teenager but is actually a grown woman."
— u/highly88
30. 2010's Knight and Day, which features Cameron Diaz's character getting repeatedly drugged by Tom Cruise's character:
Frank Masi / 20th Century Fox / Courtesy Everett Collection
" Knight and Day?! Anyone?! I feel like no one sees this movie as problematic when it's literally based on Tom Cruise repeatedly drugging and kidnapping Cameron Diaz 😭😭 it always seriously disturbs me when I see it on TV."
— u/sunny_d55
31. 2004's The Notebook, starring Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams, which focuses on a wildly toxic love story:
Gran Via / Via youtube.com
"The dynamic between the main couple was LOADED TO THE BRIM with red flags. And people thought THAT was romantic!?"
— u/Far-Revolution3225
32. 1984's Sixteen Candles, which includes a guy "giving" his drunk girlfriend to a classmate:
Universal Pictures/Channel Productions / Via youtube.com
"One boy gives another boy his unconscious girlfriend to rape, and everyone is just okay with it in the morning, including the girlfriend. So wrong."
— u/StarMom94
33. And finally...2020's Hillbilly Elegy, starring Gabriel Basso, Glenn Close, and Amy Adams, which is a portrait of the people of Appalachia based on a memoir by one of the most hateful people on Earth:
Lacey Terrell / Netflix / Courtesy Everett Collection
"I'm going out on a limb and say Hillbilly Elegy."
— u/kyflyboy
"Looking like Hillbilly Elegy is on its way to turning into a hunk of gorgonzola."
— u/MisterMasque2021
What movie do you think has aged really, really poorly? Let us know in the comments below!
Comments have been edited for length/clarity.