The Worst Movie of 2026? Maybe of the 2020s

There are plenty of instances on Rotten Tomatoes where critics and audiences are split. Critics tend to be more critical than the RT audiences, so you’ll occasionally see a 30 percent RT score from critics and an 80 percent from audiences. There are also some that work in the opposite way: Critics love them but audiences hate them — those are usually the inaccessible types, like Uncut Gems or The Witch.

But a hugely broad comedy designed to appeal to massive audiences? Critics tend to dislike those, and that’s certainly the case for Mark Wahlberg’s Balls Up (35 percent critics’ score). What’s surprising is that audiences hate it even more (23 percent).

What’s even more surprising is that anyone liked it at all. I stopped keeping track of the worst movies of the year a decade ago, but Balls Up would be my frontrunner for 2026. It’s among the worst of the decade. It is old school bad, so it’s probably not too surprising that it comes from an old-school comedy director, Peter Farrelly, whose best movie in two decades was the woefully undeserving Oscar winner Green Book.

Balls Up does come from legit writers — Paul Wernick and Rhett Reese (Deadpool, Zombieland) — though I have to imagine this is a screenplay they tucked in a drawer in the late ’90s and forgot about until Amazon offered them a bag of cash for any script they had lying around. A bag of cash, and no questions asked. I really cannot express strongly enough just how bad this movie is.

It’s about a condom inventor and a salesman, Elijah (Paul Walter Hauser) and Brad (Mark Wahlberg), who come up with the idea for a condom that also covers the testicles. It’s somehow named the official condom of the World Cup, to be held in Brazil, until Brad spoils the nine years of sobriety enjoyed by the guy running the World Cup (played by Benjamin Bratt).

Thanks to a clerical error, Elijah and Brad still have tickets to the World Cup, which they attend together. The mascot for the Brazilian team is a sausage. A drunk Elijah, believing the sausage is mocking him for the failure of his testicle condom, chases down the mascot during the game. Brad runs behind him. His face blocks Brazil’s game-tying shot in the World Cup finals. Brad and Elijah become the biggest villains in Brazilian history, which somehow leads them to a party at the home of a cartel boss (played by Sacha Baron Cohen), then into the rainforest among poachers who want to kill them for feeding an alligator condoms full of cocaine, before they escape into Argentina and are treated as heroes (Argentina being the beneficiary of the blocked goal).

That’s it. That’s the movie — except for all the “creative” uses Farrelly and the screenwriters find for the testicle condoms (cocaine storage, knee brace, pillow), and, of course, the tiny fish that swims up Brad’s urine stream and into his penis, forcing Elijah to remove it with his teeth. With. His. Teeth.

Balls Up would’ve been a bad movie in the Farrelly Bros. heyday. In 2026, it’s the most undignified paycheck of Mark Wahlberg’s career, which is genuinely saying something given his ongoing and inexplicable loyalty to Mel Gibson’s directorial vanity projects. There is not a single legitimate laugh in the entire film — only the occasional stunned, derisive “what the hell am I watching?” guffaw that comes less from amusement than from the desperate human need to make some kind of noise rather than sit in silence with what you’ve done to yourself.

That 23 percent audience score? I don’t know who those people are. I don’t want to know. What I do know is that Balls Up is not just a bad movie — it’s a monument to the indifference of everyone involved. Farrelly, coasting on a reputation he spent twenty years actively destroying. Wernick and Reese, cashing in on goodwill they actually earned. Wahlberg, who has apparently decided that the bar for his participation is simply whether the wire transfer clears. And Sacha Baron Cohen, who was once genuinely funny and is now doing cartel boss bits in an Amazon comedy about testicle condoms.

The testicle condom deserved better. So do you.