What does it take to get a 0% on Rotten Tomatoes? I watched 'War of the Worlds' to find out.

Yahoo

a day ago

Ice Cube stars in a modern adaptation of the alien invasion story, which the internet turned into a meme.
I wasn't planning on watching the straight-to-Prime-Video remake of War of the Worlds set entirely on the computer screen of a government security analyst until I saw footage of Ice Cube screaming at a young man via video call as he shakily records an alien invasion. It's so bad, it demands to be seen.
The new movie, released July 30, debuted with a rare 0% on Rotten Tomatoes, meaning that it had been panned by all of the critics who took the time to watch and review it. (It has since been elevated to 3% as of press time, thanks to a contrarian review from Entertainment Weekly.)
Scoring in the single digits for any amount of time is not an easy feat on the review aggregation website, which considers critics of varying levels of prestige in its 'Tomatometer' scores.
Without such widespread disdain, 2025's War of the Worlds might have been forgotten — slipping into the depths of Prime Video's expansive catalogue. Instead, it became a lightning rod on social media.
There's something magical about a movie that tried to be good and ended up being bad in so many ways that thousands of people still took the time to investigate the extent of its failure. I myself was intrigued by the widespread condemnation of what seemed to be a real movie with a budget and familiar actors — surely, it can't be that bad! — so, for 89 unhinged minutes, I sat down on my couch and watched it for myself.
So, what happens in this movie?
Ice Cube stars as William Radford, a grizzly 'domestic terror analyst' who spends his days stalking his pregnant biologist daughter, Faith (Iman Benson), and underperforming video game streamer son, Dave (Henry Hunter Hall). As an employee of the Department of Homeland Security, he has access to seemingly every camera and technology in the Washington, D.C., area — he hacks his daughter's fridge to monitor what she consumes (too much soy milk, apparently) and frequently right-clicks on flashing targets on his computer to select a menu option that says 'Commandeer Drone.'
Luckily, William was just starting his workday as aliens invaded, though he frequently declines calls from 'Sandra NASA' (Eva Longoria) and ignores Microsoft Teams messages from his DHS boss (Clark Gregg) in favor of yelling at his son for buying new video games and hacking his daughter's computer to see what her baby daddy, Mark (Devon Bostick), an Amazon delivery driver, is telling her about their upcoming shower that William is not invited to.
I know that the goal of this movie is to show how, in the 2020s, the response to an alien invasion would be mostly online.
Unlike the 2005 film adaptation starring Tom Cruise and Dakota Fanning, we wouldn't be fighting invaders on the ground as much as we'd be watching clips of the chaos unfold on X and Instagram. I did wonder, though, how aliens who initiated their invasion of Earth by blowing up NASA satellites so they couldn't be surveilled and immediately began destroying data centers as soon as they landed left our internet intact. The world may be ending as we know it, but because Microsoft Teams and Google Sheets were still operating, some people still had to work.
Ridiculous alien movie logic aside, the fact that 2025's War of the Worlds anticipates that the apocalypse will be somewhat mundane feels appropriate for our dystopian times.
Unfortunately for this movie, any new take on War of the Worlds — and there have been dozens since H.G. Wells's original novel was published in 1898 — would have to stand in the shadow of the most interesting adaptation: the 1938 radio drama that sparked nationwide hysteria after being misinterpreted as a real broadcast of an invasion.
By standing out — though it's for being absurd, poorly acted and ridiculously edited — the 2025 version has accomplished something amazing.
Is it actually bad?
While watching the film, I made a list of the dialogue and plot points that made me laugh out loud. Here are a few:
As the star of a movie about a guy sitting at his computer, I don't envy the work Ice Cube has to do here. God forbid a camera ever record my looking-at-my-laptop face, let alone amid an alien invasion.
There are so many references to Amazon made throughout the film, it might as well be an ad.
So bad it's good
My list only scratches the surface of the chaos. To take a moment to jot down something that made me laugh meant tearing my eyes away from the screen, where ridiculous things were happening in such rapid succession that even three seconds of dwindling attention meant I might miss an editing failure or a bizarrely worded Teams message.
Even though I was on my couch reading posts about it online, my viewing experience was less like watching a movie and more like attending an event. I'm grateful for the social media dogpile that inspired me to watch War of the Worlds in the first place, but because of the way social platforms seem to reward negative opinions, scoring a 0% on Rotten Tomatoes might not be a rare feat for much longer.
Dan Green, director of the Master of Entertainment Industry Management program at Carnegie Mellon University, tells Yahoo that the collective panning of the film reveals how audience review websites like Rotten Tomatoes 'have been transformed into a competitive exercise in disdain, reflecting a gamified culture of online critique.'
In other words, watching movies and making fun of them on social media and review sites now feels like a community activity. For a moment, people were so united by the intrigue of a 0% score that War of the Worlds reached the No. 2 spot on Prime Video's U.S. movie rankings.
It's now part of Rotten Tomatoes' unofficial Hall of Shame, among the few dozen widely reviewed and panned films of all time, like 2018's Gotti starring John Travolta and 2014's Left Behind starring Nicolas Cage. After the fun I had watching this one, I think I'll make my way through the list.