Only 4 Star Wars Movies Are Kind of Bad

Published Oct 13, 2026, 5:42 PM EDT

Jeremy has more than 2800 published articles on Collider to his name, and has been writing for the site since February 2022. He's an omnivore when it comes to his movie-watching diet, so will gladly watch and write about almost anything, from old Godzilla films to gangster flicks to samurai movies to classic musicals to the French New Wave to the MCU... well, maybe not the Disney+ shows.
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In 2027, Star Wars will celebrate its 50th anniversary, and it'll probably be a great time to talk positively about the series and its legacy. At the time of writing, though, it’s not quite 2027, and Star Wars instead celebrated a less noteworthy 49th anniversary this year, in effect. It was a year that the series returned to the big screen, but with an absolute whimper, so those are enough reasons to indulge in a bit of negativity. Also, to frame things less negatively, there is something to be said about how most Star Wars movies have something to offer, and as far as outright masterpieces go, it is a series that'll always have the original and The Empire Strikes Back.

That’s two-thirds of the original trilogy, and Return of the Jedi, while not as strong, is still good. The prequel trilogy is a bit more contentious, but Revenge of the Sith is great, and then the post-George Lucas Disney era… well, that’s been very contentious, but Rogue One: A Star Wars Story is well-liked (especially because it led to Andor), and Episodes VII and VIII have their fans (the former more than the latter, but still). That leaves, uh, some other movies that aren’t as good. If you're after genuinely bad Star Wars movies, or are new to the series (somehow) and want to know which ones you can skip, then maybe the following ranking of the very worst Star Wars movies so far will come in handy.

4 'Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones' (2002)

Image via Lucasfilm

Without George Lucas, there’s no Star Wars, obviously. It’s like that with any iconic series that comes from just one person, because sure, Denis Villeneuve has made a couple of great Dune movies (and his third will hopefully impress, too), but without Frank Herbert, those Villeneuve movies wouldn’t exist. George Lucas himself hasn’t directed a Star Wars movie since 2005’s Revenge of the Sith, and has been away from the franchise entirely since selling Lucasfilm to Disney in 2012, but his importance clearly can’t be overstated. It even makes some of his lesser writing and/or directorial efforts forgivable. Like, even Revenge of the Sith isn't perfect, but it feels like a culmination and an appropriately grand climax, and definitely a film only Lucas could've made.

The same can maybe even be said about the first movie in the prequel trilogy, The Phantom Menace, which at least has some fun sequences alongside a fair few things that don’t work. The things that work in Attack of the Clones, however, aren’t as easy to come by. It’s ambitious on a technical front, for what that’s worth, and it features an expectedly great John Williams score that does quite a lot of heavy lifting, but not enough really happens here narratively, and it’s just lacking a certain sense of excitement, spectacle, and drama. It’s a necessary piece of the prequel trilogy, sure, but it’s a fairly flawed trilogy even without Attack of the Clones, and there are some really boring and clunky parts of this movie that further work to diminish the overall quality of the only Star Wars trilogy where all three movies were directed by the same person. Still, if you can get through The Phantom Menace, and then tough it out through Attack of the Clones, you will be rewarded by (the mostly pretty great) Revenge of the Sith, so that’s something, at least.

3 'The Mandalorian and Grogu' (2026)

Image via Disney

At the risk of repeating a lot of what was said about Attack of the Clones, The Mandalorian and Grogu only really has a good score to offer, albeit not a John Williams one. It was done by Ludwig Göransson, and he put in so much more effort than required, to the point where you should probably just listen to the score and not watch the movie. You're not missing much, if anything, outside some opportunities to see Grogu be cute, albeit not in ways that you haven’t already seen if you’ve watched The Mandalorian. Also, Göransson trying really stands out when you look at what everyone else involved with this movie was doing, or just refusing to do. Sigourney Weaver looks the most bored an actor could possibly look, Pedro Pascal (who’s only unmasked briefly), Jeremy Allen White, and Martin Scorsese (?!) all give very lackluster voice performances, the action is frequent but unimaginative, and the dialogue is so stilted you almost have to hear it to believe it.

The action isn't even particularly fun, and good music paired with some occasionally amusing creatures and aliens? It’s not nearly enough to sustain a theatrically released movie that runs for more than two hours.

The general consensus around The Mandalorian and Grogu, when it came out, seemed to be, “Oh, it’s watchable and fine,” but most people were being way too generous to this miserable and sorry excuse for a film. It’s barely even a film, with no sense of flow, pacing, stakes, or escalation throughout. It’s a purgatorial movie, and it’s an honestly ghastly waste of money, for $165 million to be spent on something this creatively bankrupt. The action isn't even particularly fun, and good music paired with some occasionally amusing creatures and aliens? It’s not nearly enough to sustain a theatrically released movie that runs for more than two hours. The TV movies weren’t counted here, since, sure, The Star Wars Holiday Special might well be worse than The Mandalorian and Grogu and the other two movies that are about to be mentioned, but not by much (and also, The Star Wars Holiday Special is at least bad in an interesting and sometimes funny way).

2 'Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker' (2019)

Well, yeah, it had to be here, right? The sequel trilogy was ultimately missed potential, by the end of it all, seeing as the end of it all was The Rise of Skywalker, and it really revealed how scattershot the whole production was behind this trilogy. The Force Awakens was familiar but fun, while The Last Jedi proved divisive but at least interesting, while The Rise of Skywalker seemed desperate to please the people who didn’t like The Last Jedi. But even compared to The Force Awakens (also directed by J.J. Abrams), it was clearly inferior. A shallow and easy crowd-pleaser does still please crowds, which is always going to be worth something, while The Rise of Skywalker knows it’s broken, and so it just throws so much noise and nonsense at you, hoping you'll be too overwhelmed to be critical.

It kind of works in the moment, because The Rise of Skywalker is dizzying, but it’s too maximalist even then, and so it’s not a particularly fun kind of dizzying. It's more of a headache, or something like a manic rush of a movie, or maybe a few movies crammed into one, and you do very much feel the lack of breathing room. Then, reflecting on the movie, and what it means not only for the sequel trilogy, but the whole 9-episode-long Skywalker Saga… it all just falls apart all the more. Nothing holds up, very little makes sense, and you have to do some serious digging if you want to find any redeeming values here. The Rise of Skywalker is bad enough that it almost makes Attack of the Clones and The Mandalorian and Grogu look good, but not quite (emphasis on the "almost"). Still, it’s not the worst theatrically released Star Wars movie, thanks to the existence of…

1 'Star Wars: The Clone Wars' (2008)

Image via Warner Bros. Pictures

...Star Wars: The Clone Wars. The movie you might've forgotten existed (lucky you), if you ever even knew about it in the first place. The problems here are very much the same ones found in The Mandalorian and Grogu; namely, the sense that you're watching something not made for the big screen. Star Wars: The Clone Wars was a feature-length pilot episode for the TV series of the same name, or maybe more accurately three or four episodes of that show awkwardly stitched together into a film. The Mandalorian and Grogu feels like a season of The Mandalorian condensed into a bit over two hours, owing to how choppy and episodic it feels, and the fact that there are about as many action scenes in that film as you'd expect to see (on a one-per-episode basis) in a short season of a TV show.

The thing is, with Star Wars: The Clone Wars, it’s somehow even less narratively satisfying, more annoying with its characters and attempts at humor, and even uglier on a visual front, honestly looking like one of the least appealing theatrically released animated films of the last couple of decades. It is embarrassing that it went to theaters the same way it was embarrassing that The Mandalorian and Grogu was passed off as a theatrical film. Also, Dave Filoni was involved with both, directing Star Wars: The Clone Wars and co-writing The Mandalorian and Grogu, and these movies, taken together, do very little to inspire confidence surrounding the news of him now being, as of early 2026, co-president of Lucasfilm. Star Wars, what are you doing right now? This is not the way.

Star Wars: The Clone Wars