My Movie Awards 2025

Awards season has come and gone. People speculated what would win Best Picture at the most prestigious awards ceremonies, then watched as certain movies took home the awards. Top 10 lists hit the internet. I didn’t want to do a plain old Top 10. I wanted to do my own awards so I could celebrate all things movies, instead of just the ten I enjoyed most in 2025. Yeah, this is a second annual awards post for me.

I put this off longer than I should have. My head wouldn’t let me not try to get to 100 movies for the year. That would have taken me a few more weeks from when I started this post, and I didn’t want to wait that long. So I’m topping out at… 84 movies for 2025. That’s an increase of ten over the movies eligible for my awards last year. Maybe the 2026 edition will have a full hundred. I can wish.

Here’s how this will work. I made a spreadsheet of possible awards to choose from. There are a bunch I probably won’t go with because I prefer the fun ones. I like to go with the ones more specific to me, or more specific than your standard best actor, best director sort of thing. I want to highlight other elements or qualities, or single out certain things. I want to make these awards feel a little different and personalized.

Some of these awards might sound familiar. A bunch fo them returned from last year. There will also be new ones that will continue forward and some that were specific to something that happened in 2025. Not all the awards from last year will return, either. Remember when there was an award called From Mean Girls to Netflix Romantic Lead? Yeah, that was specific to 2024 and didn’t make it to this year. There were a few like that.

Anyway, I’ve been rambling on long enough. You’re all here and, hopefully, still reading because you’re interested in my thoughts on the 84 movies released in 2025 that I’ve seen. I’m going to get into it the same way I got into it last year, with the same first award.

The Sunday “Bad” Movies Memorial Award

If you remember my awards for the 2024 movie releases, you might remember this award. It was dedicated to my other blog. I write about bad movies quite often because they can be as revealing to the art of filmmaking as the good movies. Learn from your mistakes. Find the promise in something bad. That sort of thing. This award goes out to the movie that I think best fits the spirit of Sunday “Bad” Movies.

The 2024 winner was Hot Frosty, a Netflix Christmas romcom where a woman fell in love with a snowman that came to life by way of magic scarf. It shared a bunch of qualities with other movies that blog has covered. And, yeah, it had already been covered at that point, so the category may have been rigged.

This year, I’ve got five more movies that hit some of the qualities I look at when picking movies for that blog. Have I featured any of them in the blog? I won’t lie. I have. That doesn’t mean they will for sure win, though. I could go back and watch one of the others again, just to write about it. Nothing is stopping me from doing that.

The five nominees are:

• War of the Worlds
• Takeout
• Dead Mail
• Mouseboat Massacre
• Cannibal Mukbang

Last year, figuring out a winner for this category was tough. This year, it was a no-brainer. But before I say the obvious winner, I just want to say that the other nominees all had things I liked. An interesting setting, an underlying theme that was deeper than I could have expected, or a concept that was interesting but had been done better in another movie in 2025.

Yet none of that spirit of Sunday “Bad” Movies and finding good things in the bad could overcome how ridiculous the winner was. War of the Worlds easily took home The Sunday “Bad” Movies Memorial Award. It was inevitable. It was a poorly done version of the classic H.G. Wells story that relied heavily on stock footage before turning into a commercial for Amazon Prime.

War of the Worlds won one other award from me. It was the only nominee because nothing could even come close to it. War of the Worlds won the award for the Worst Use of Archive Footage. How could it not? About 95% of the movie was comprised of stock footage. Anything that didn’t have an actor looking directly into the camera was stock footage, simply with a few alien craft placed over it with post effects work. Yeah, it wasn’t great.

War of the Worlds may come up again one more time later in the awards, but I need to follow up the Worst Use of Archive Footage with the award for the Best Use of Archive Footage. There were only two nominees, as I thought up these two awards later in the year. There will likely be a more rounded out class next year. Anyway, Hell House L.L.C: Lineage was nominated for using footage from the previous movies in the franchise. The winner, however, was Jay Kelly. This Noah Baumbach flick ended on a compilation of footage from George Clooney’s career, framing it as a tribute to Jay Kelly. It was a lovely look at a storied actor. Delightful.

Congratulations to War of the Worlds on its two wins (so far?) and Jay Kelly on its one.

Nepo Baby Acting Award

Here we go with another returning award for this year’s post. The idea behind this award is to highlight a performer who got their role more from their family name than their actual talent. This doesn’t necessarily mean that they were a bad performer. It simply means that they got their opportunities through their relatives. In many cases, though, there could have been a better choice for the role.

Last year saw Saleka Shyamalan take home the award for her performance in Trap. She was cast by her father in a movie he directed. She was turned into a superstar of Taylor Swift proportions. She was highlighted as a great musician that people fawned over. Could there have been better people for the role? Sure. But she was family and she would get that role. That’s how this award goes. Here are this year’s nominees:

• Sunny and Sadie Sandler, the daughters of Adam Sandler, in Happy Gilmore 2
• Ray Nicholson, son of Jack Nicholson, in Novocaine
• Cooper Hoffman, son of Philip Seymour Hoffman, in The Long Walk
• Zoe Kravitz, daughter of Lenny Kravitz and Lisa Bonet, in Caught Stealing
• Sadie Sandler, daughter of Adam Sandler, in Jay Kelly

The timing of this award is a little funny because it came right after a small Jay Kelly win. Look at that last nominee. It’s Jay Kelly again. And guess what? Jay Kelly won again. I wanted to give the award to both Sunny and Sadie because of how often Adam Sandler pops them into the Happy Madison movies. However, he managed to get Sadie into one of the movies he was in that wasn’t a Happy Madison production. It was as though Noah Baumbach approached him and he agreed to the movie as long as his daughter could play his daughter. That, my friends, is nepotism at its finest.

This wouldn’t be the last award Jay Kelly was nominated for. It was nominated for Cleary Made for Lead to Star, but lost that award to Friendship. If you’ve ever seen anything Tim Robinson has done, you would understand how Tim Robinson coded the entire movie was. This year’s awards look to be a good showing for Jay Kelly.

Oddest Meet Cute

Ninety-nine percent of movie romances share a few key elements. One such element is the meet cute, where the leads connect for the first time. Well, I like the strange ones. I like the meet cutes that are so specific and odd that you can’t help but laugh at them. I’m not talking about two people trying to grab the same coffee at a Starbucks. I’m talking things like last year’s winner, Música, where one of the leads saw the other across a fish market, then got knocked out when a fish smacked him in the face. We get some odd ones every year. This year was no different. The nominees are:

• Companion – One character spilled all the oranges in the grocery store
• Companion – At a costume party, one character stepped on the tail of the other character’s dinosaur costume
• Maintenance Required – They met through an online car forum in 2025
• The Pickup – Money guard pointed gun at woman, thinking she was robbing a bank
• Sacramento – Camping naked along the side of a river

For the second year in a row, this category was a close race. Every option was a good option. Except for one, really. There was one I eliminated almost immediately. Then I narrowed the field down to two. One was ridiculous on the surface. The other was ridiculous the more I thought about it. But I had to make a choice, and that choice was the winner. Oddest Meet Cute was won by The Pickup. The others couldn’t beat the idea that a money guard saw the woman as a threat only for her note at the bank to not be a robbery note and, in fact, just be her phone number.

Another award that The Pickup was nominated for was Amazon Prime Doesn’t Know How to Shoot Car Chases, which it lost to Playdate. I will hopefully have a better name for that award when it inevitably returns for the 2026 instalment of this post series.

The Tropeyest Trope Award

Movies are built on tropes. There are certain story beats that help make plots roll from one scene to the next. Sometimes, however, these tropes get in the way of good storytelling. Rather than feeling natural to the flow of events, they stand out. You recognize them immediately. This is an award dedicated to that feeling. The Tropeyest Trope Award is presented to the movie that most stuck to a certain movie trope that you couldn’t help but do that Leonardo DiCaprio point from Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. You know the one.

Last year, this award was taken home by one of my favourite tropes that shouldn’t still be getting use. Música utilized the trope where one character was on two dates at the same restaurant at the same time, juggling between which one to be present for. I don’t know how anyone could think that was still a good source of comedy for their story. I’m still here for it, though. Anyway, here are this year’s nominees:

• Wolf Man – Zombie Infectee – Says it’s not a bite/scratch, but it is
• Playdate – TykeBomb/Designer Babies – Military raised genetically engineers super soldier children
• Squad 36 – Turn in Your Badge – The cop must stop the crime on his own.
• Mickey 17 – How We Got Here – You might be wondering how I got in this situation…
• Novocaine – You Should See the Other Guy – Main character is completely beat up, but the villain is dead.

Last year went wild with the two dates at the same time at the same restaurant trope. This year wasn’t quite as crazy, but there were still some fun ones in there. The winner is going to be Novocaine. It wasn’t just the use of the trope that put Novocaine over the others. It was because it was used in Novocaine, a movie about a guy who couldn’t feel pain. He got injuries that nobody would be able to suffer through under normal circumstances. They would have killed anyone else from shock alone. And he still pulled a “you should see the other guy” on people. Crazy stuff.

I’m also going to toss Novocaine an award for The Most Ironic Music Choice of 2025. They played R.E.M.’s Everybody Hurts over a movie where the main character could not feel pain. Intentional, yes. Congrats on the awards.

Strangest Horror Concept

I’m almost always up for watching a horror flick. I’ll watch pretty much anything. That means I saw some odd horror in 2025. Were there any stranger things than what I saw in the nominees for this award? I don’t think so. Each of these horror movies took unique concepts and ran with them. They made the strange into the horrific in mostly successful ways.

I have five nominees for you that took some interesting concepts and made a whole story with them. If you’re a horror fan, you should check them out. They might not be as interesting to you as they were to me. But I found them interesting, and I’m glad they tried these ideas. What was the strangest? Here are your five nominees:

• Good Boy – A supernatural horror story told from the perspective of a dog.
• Heart Eyes – A rom com within a slasher setting.
• Scared Shitless – A father and son plumber duo fight off a monster in the pipes of an apartment building.
• Death of a Unicorn – A unicorn is killed in a car accident and other unicorns seek revenge.
• Dark Match – Wrestlers are put in death matches as sacrifices to summon a demon.

I had a very tough time with Strangest Horror Concept. There were three nominees that each deserved the win. Only one could win, however. And that one movie was Heart Eyes. There was one key reason that Heart Eyes won. The other movies were strange concepts, but the overall story was fairly standard. A ghost story with a dog as the main character. A monster story with plumbers. A cult sacrifice story with wrestlers. An animal attack movie where the animals were unicorns. The story was standard, the elements were odd. Heart Eyes was a romantic comedy and slasher put together, which wasn’t a standard story. The actual story was odd. The winner is Heart Eyes.

Heart Eyes was also nominated for Favourite Addition to Niche Genre because of how it was another slasher-based genre blend from the mind of Christopher Landon (Happy Death Day and Freaky). However, it lost to Nonnas, another of those movies where old ladies hang out and have a good time (80 for Brady, Book Club, Calendar Girls, and kind of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel).

The ACAB Award

Here’s a renamed award for you. The ACAB Award, formerly known as The Cops Are Bad, is an award that highlights the worst police officers to grace the movie screen in the past year. They could be dirty cops, violent cops, or cops who just straight up didn’t do their jobs properly. It’s something that happens in real life, and something that happens in abundance in movies.

Last year’s award went to Rebel Ridge for having a police force that basically corrupted an entire town into allowing it to stay corrupted. Absolute corruption corrupts absolutely. That’s the saying, right? Whatever. This year’s nominees are:

• Nobody 2 – The cops are a middle-man warehouse crew for big mafia.
• Eddington – Anti-maskers, anti-vaxxers, using their funding for their sheriff to run for mayor.
• Caught Stealing – She was working with the Russians all along.
• Squad 36 – The whole squad was corrupt, except for the guy who got kicked out of it, who then took them down, only to be killed by the remaining dirty cops to cover everything up.
• Havoc – Yeah, they’re just dirty. Trying to steal cocaine to sell.

This category was a no-brainer through most of the year. One movie was pretty much assured to win since the entire story was about dirty cops. Squad 36 takes home The ACAB Award. Not only were most of the cops dirty. Even when they lost, corruption still won. The moral of the movie was that cops would stay dirty. Talk about the pure definition of ACAB.

One of the nominees, Nobody 2, was nominated for a different award. The Best Character Introduction was a tight race with David in Nobody 2 being nominated alongside the likes of Brax in The Accountant 2, Teresa in Nonnas, and Keats in The Electric State. In the end, they all lost the award. The winner had to go to Sonny from F1 and his introduction that opened the film. I have a whole lotta love for F1.

Oh, We’re Retelling That Now

Last year, I had an award called That Story Seemed Familiar. It got split off into two awards this year, each being a different version of that award. The first one, which was already handed out earlier in this post, was Favourite Addition to a Niche Genre, which was more about sharing broader elements with a group of other movies. This award is more targeted.

Oh, We’re Retelling That Now is an award about a movie that doesn’t just share elements with other movies. This is about a movie that feels more like a copy of another movie. It’s more specific than that broader category. There’s more in common than an idea. Here are the nominees:

• Sinners – Seems like a good party until people turn into vampires halfway through the night. Family connection. That sort of stuff. It’s basically a new version of From Dusk Til Dawn.
• Fountain of Youth – A group of adventurers, including a brother and sister, end up in Egypt to try and find the Fountain of Youth. The sister’s child is along for the adventure. Other teams are out to stop them, including someone tasked with protecting the Fountain of Youth. Is this The Mummy Returns?
• M3GAN 2.0 – A bigger, better robot comes along. M3GAN returns but is now good. The characters try to teach her to get away from murdering people. It is much more action-oriented than its predecessor. The climax involves breaking into the facility where the end of humanity is supposed to begin. M3GAN sacrifices herself to stop the bad robot. Does this sound like Terminator 2: Judgement Day at all?
• Avatar: Fire and Ash – Okay, so the climax is essentially the same exact climax as Avatar: The Way of Water.

Yes, there were only four nominees in this category. And, for me, it really came down to those final two nominees. In the end, the winner was M3GAN 2.0. There was enough difference throughout most of Avatar: Fire and Ash that I couldn’t give it the award based on the climax, alone. M3GAN 2.0, however… The whole movie felt like this generation’s Terminator 2: Judgement Day. I thought that at the beginning, and everything that happened made me feel that even more. It was well deserving of this award.

I will, however, give Avatar: Fire and Ash the award for Too Many Endings. There were three separate climactic action scenes that each felt like they could have been the climactic action scene. It didn’t know when to stop. So, there you go, James Cameron. You got an award. Can you do it again?

Most Familiar Moment

Here we have another award that plays on the familiarity of movies from 2025. This one doesn’t take the whole movie into consideration, however. It takes a moment or a scene. Maybe this is where Avatar: Fire and Ash should have been. That’s probably why it’s one of the nominees. I’m getting ahead of myself, though.

The idea behind this award was to take a scene or a moment and look at how it clearly riffed on something from a movie or television show that came before. As people who watch movies, we recognize these things. The people making the movies probably also recognize them. Maybe not in the moment of making them. They might just think something is a cool idea. Surely, they realize it after the fact. Maybe it’s an homage. Maybe it’s unintentional. Maybe it’s outright theft. We’ll never know, but I’ll still call these movies out on it. Here are the nominees:

• Avatar: Fire and Ash – Used the same climax with the whales that Avatar: The Way of Water did.
• Den of Thieves 2: Pantera – The breakout at the end of the movie felt like the end of Fast and Furious or the beginning of Fast Five.
• Fountain of Youth – What happened to the villain was very reminiscent of what happened at the end of Raider of the Lost Ark.
• Happy Gilmore 2 – The death of Veronica to kick off the movie seemed pulled from the death of Paul’s mom in Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2.
• Now You See Me: Now You Don’t – A rotating hallway? They already did that in Inception.

This award had to go to Avatar: Fire and Ash. Not only did their climactic action sequence feel familiar, it was ripped from the same franchise. It wasn’t an homage to an earlier movie in the franchise. No no. It was a repeat of a conflict. They stopped the poachers in the film before, only for the poachers to return and have the same face-off. None of the other movies were nominated for moments feeling like they were exact copies of earlier moments in their franchise. Congratulations, Avatar: Fire and Ash.

Avatar: Fire and Ash lost out on What In the Green Screen Did I Just Watch, an award for the most green screen looking movie, or similar digital compositing technique movie, of the year. The winner was The Fantastic Four: First Steps. I don’t want to get too into my choice here. I’ll just say that my choice had to do with how well the non-digital characters fit within their digital worlds, and Avatar pulled it off better. Thus, The Fantastic Four: First Steps wins this award.

Best End Credits Vibe Music

It’s time for another new award this year. This is an award that I will likely rename by the time these awards come around next year. Yes, this is an award I plan on keeping around. I like this award. I thought of it a little late in the year and had to go back to study what I had seen so I could choose the nominees.

This award highlights a movie that chose an end credits song that perfectly fit the transition from story to credits, and managed to end the movie off on a vibe that kept me in my seat, chilling with the song. You know the ones. Everyone is walking out of the theater because the movie is over, but you sit there nodding your head and tapping your feet. That feel of the movie still lingers over you because the song captures something. It could be the tone of the movie, or it could be a contrast. Doesn’t matter. You’re vibing. I’m vibing. I vibed to these five nominees:

• Heart Eyes – You Can’t Hurry Love
• The Monkey – Twistin’ the Night Away
• Captain America: Brave New World – i
• One Battle After Another – American Girl
• The Running Man – Keep on Running

The vibe that hit me best is a very subjective thing. You might not agree with any of my choices, and I can’t necessarily explain why my winner is The Monkey and its use of Twistin’ the Night Away. There was just something about hitting the end of that horror dark comedy, seeing one final death, and then Sam Cooke playing over the credits that worked for me. I stayed in my seat and became one with that vibe. The others were good, too, but I keep coming back to that one being the one I remember fonder than the others.

I want to quickly mention another music award, a returning award from last year. That Song Belongs to a Different Movie was won by Time Cut last year, for using A Thousand Miles, which everyone knows is a song that belongs to Terry Crews and White Chicks. Well, this year’s winner is The Life of Chuck for using Gimme Some Lovin’ by The Spencer Davis Group. I grew up only associating that song with Days of Thunder because every time I saw a Bose surround sound demonstration, they used the scene from Days of Thunder that the song was featured in. Hearing that song in another movie feels wrong.

Lightning Round

Now seems like a good time to quickly go through a few awards. Some of these were awards that didn’t have many nominees, thus only the winner will suffice. Others were ones I wanted to highlight without going into any depth. The awards and winners are:

• I Never Expected That Song went to Warfare for the use of Call on Me by Eric Prydz.
• The Perfectly Mid Movie went to The Map That Leads to You.
• They Came Out of Retirement for THAT? went to Back in Action and Cameron Diaz.
• He Was in Two Stephen King Movies This Year went to Mark Hamill for The Life of Chuck and The Long Walk.
• This Very Much Felt Like an Excuse for Tom Cruise to Run in South Africa went to Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning.
• That One Joke I Know Was a John Cena Idea to Show His Comedic Side went to Heads of State for the sheep nipple bit.
• That’s Some Crazy Weather went to The Great Flood.
• How Many People Does It Take to Kill One Person went to The Running Man.
• Retire This Element went to long shots from above of people driving through the woods, which was featured in Wolf Man, Until Dawn, and Bambi: The Reckoning, among others.
• Best Use of a Specific Form of Fighting went to Now You See Me: Now You Don’t for magic tricks.
• The Marine Memorial Award went to A Working Man.

And, with those out of the way, let’s get back to our regularly scheduled awards programming.

Nostalgia for Nostalgia’s Sake

One of the biggest tools a movie can use to get audiences’ butts into seats is to play on nostalgia. Pulling in elements from older movies, whether they be an earlier movie in that franchise or another movie altogether, can cause audiences to think fondly about the things they loved in the past. However, they sometimes pull in elements that are too specific or too unrelated for these nostalgic moments to feel natural to the story.

Last year’s winner, Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, perfectly encapsulated this award by bringing back the librarian ghost from the opening of the original Ghostbusters. Somehow, in the forty years between the first movie and that entry, she hadn’t been a busted ghost. It didn’t make a lot of sense. That was last year, though. This is this year. We have five new nominees. They are:

• Roofman – He hides out in a Toys ‘R Us
• Love Hurts – Goonies reunion between Ke Huy Quan and Sean Astin
• Happy Gilmore 2 – The graveyard scene (the mention of the slow motion gold jacket run, to all the dead characters names on gravestones, to the pieces of shit for breakfast drop, to the game over bitch, to jackass, to the rhyming, to the nursing home lady voice)
• The Running Man – Arnold Schwarzenegger on money
• Jay Kelly – George Clooney movie clips

Oh, look. There’s Jay Kelly again. The award had to go to the other Adam Sandler movie on the list, though, Happy Gilmore 2. The whole movie was cameos and nostalgic callbacks, but no callbacks were more apparent than in that graveyard scene. I think that was the takeaway of anyone who saw the movie, and that’s why it won the award in a landslide.

Happy Gilmore 2 did win another award from me. That award was The Man of Steel Memorial Should Have Been This Story Award, the award for the movie I think should have taken a different angle and told a story that was hiding under the surface. Happy Gilmore 2 shouldn’t have been about that whole snipped tendon thing that made all his rivals look weird when smacking those balls. It should have been about getting back into golf and how it got him over his grief. That’s not what we got, though.

Interesting Time Structure

Most movies are told in a relatively linear fashion. You start with a character in one place, they get to another place throughout the movie, and then they end somewhere. That doesn’t satisfy all writers. It might not fit their story, their vision. So they change things up. They change the structure of time. Here’s an award for those movies, the ones that played with time in an interesting way.

Last year, Trap took home the award. The concept of telling the story in real time (up to a point) at a concert really spoke to me. It added some restrictions to what could happen and when it could happen. This year didn’t have a movie that took place at a concert, but it did have some other interesting time structures. Here are the nominees:

• The Life of Chuck – The chapters were backwards
• Until Dawn – The night repeated
• Weapons – Different points of view happening concurrently to tell the full story
• The Great Flood – Different iterations of the same thing
• A House of Dynamite – Same story told from three perspectives

This year’s winner had to be The Great Flood. We’ve seen many movies use the concept that Groundhog Day made famous, the time loop. People trapped in the same day until they could find the right series of events to teach them a lesson and get them out. The Great Flood took that time loop idea and presented it as a series of iterations in a computer program, which was a fun, new to me way to execute that concept. It made me smile when I noticed it.

The Great Flood was also nominated for Most Interesting Dystopia, but lost out to The Life of Chuck for the first (last) act of the movie. The whole world just shutting down in The Life of Chuck wasn’t something I had really thought of at any point. It wasn’t all the conveniences of civilization that were going away. The stars in the sky were disappearing. Everything was going dark. It was the end times. It was fascinating.

No Guys, This Thing/Place is Meaningful to Me, Specifically

Now we are into some of my favourite awards of this entire shindig. This award celebrates those things that characters hold dear, even when everyone else might find them a little too attached to that thing. You know, like if someone had been chewing the same stick of gum for three years because it held some sort of sentimental value for them long after the flavour was gone. Things like that are the bread and butter of this award.

Last year, the award went to Tree Fred from Road House. It was a real tree that they brought into the movie as a weird piece of connection between the main character and the girl whose family ran the local bookstore. The way the main character watched that tree with a longing look as he took the bus out of town… Yeah, he cared about Tree Fred. This year’s nominees are:

• The Map That Leads to You – Grandpa’s journal
• Love Hurts – Real Estate Agent of the Year Award
• F1 – Playing Cards
• The Running Man – Sock
• Ballerina – Wind Up Ballerina Snowglobe

The clear winner for me this year was the Real Estate Agent of the Year Award from Love Hurts. A couple of the nominees were motivational items, which kind of removed the “too attached” part of what makes the perfect winner. The Real Estate Agent of the Year Award, though? It didn’t necessarily move the plot forward, but there was an entire fight about saving the award from damage. The award meant a lot to the main character and his relationship to his boss. But it was nowhere near a driving force in the love story or the action story, which made it the perfect winner.

I also want to present Love Hurts with the award for Best Actor Reunion, Non-Sequel. The main character was played by Ke Huy Quan and his boss was played by Sean Astin, which was a nice little reunion of a couple Goonies. Having grown up with The Goonies being a movie I watched a bunch, I loved to see it, though I know it was just playing on my nostalgia. That’s why that exact moment was nominated for Nostalgia for Nostalgia’s Sake.

The Sequel That Didn’t Understand What Made the Previous Movie(s) Work

A new award to my awards post this year, this award highlights a frustration of mine. Certain producers decide to make a sequel to a movie because of how successful it was. However, the sequel lost something. One of the strongest elements of what came before was forgotten as the producers chose something else to focus on. They missed why the movie was so successful in the first place and kept the lesser elements. That sort of thing. It’s tough to really describe.

Maybe these nominees will help explain what I mean:

• Den of Thieves 2: Pantera – Replaced the cat and mouse story with a buddy cop sort of thing.
• The Accountant 2 – There wasn’t really any accounting, which was the thing that brought the character in for the original.
• M3GAN 2.0 – Stopped being horror, started being action.
• Happy Gilmore 2 – Waaaaay too elaborate with the grief and the rival league and all the cameos and references. Where was the simplicity that focused on character in a comedy setting?
• Hell House LLC: Lineage – Stopped being found footage

For me, this was an easy category. Sure, four of the sequels lost what made the original work. Though three of those four, in my opinion, succeeded in their own way. But when you look at Hell House LLC: Lineage, there was so much lost by removing the found footage structure. It was a franchise built on what you could and couldn’t see through found footage. It was a structure that allowed the haunted house settings to feel like haunted house carnival attractions gone tragically wrong. The movies had been built as documentaries with real footage from people who had been there. All of that disappeared when Hell House LLC: Lineage went more cinematic. That is why Hell House LLC: Lineage won this award.

Hell House LLC: Lineage lost the award for What is This Movie Trying to Be? to a little movie called Fear Street: Prom Queen. The fourth Fear Street movie felt like there were three different ideas for what the tone should be. Rather than figuring out which would work best, they tried throwing all the tones into the movie and it made everything a giant mess. So, yeah, a fitting winner.

The Channing Tatum Memorial Cameo Award

I don’t entirely know how this wasn’t an award that I featured in the first year. I missed out on something special there. This award was named after Channing Tatum because of how often he has popped up in a goofy cameo role in a movie. Off the top of my head, without thinking, he was in a single scene of Step Up 2: The Streets after being the main character in Step Up. He sort of did the same in G.I. Joe: Retaliation after being the lead in the first. The real cameos, though, were when he popped up in movies like This is the End, Bullet Train, Free Guy, and any of the LEGO movies.

Every year, there are numerous cameos in numerous movies. I wanted to make this award to both celebrate cameos and also kind of point out the ridiculous ones. It’s a strange combination that is tough to truly explain. I know it in my head when I’m not overthinking it. Anyway, your nominees are:

Love Hurts – Drew Scott

Happy Gilmore 2 – The whole movie

A House of Dynamite – Angel Reese

The Monkey – Adam Scott

The Naked Gun – Dave Bautista

Okay, yeah, this award was always going to go to Happy Gilmore 2 this year. The entire movie was a cameo. Every scene had someone new in it. If I had to pick out the best cameos, they would be the real golfers. Will Zalatoris was the best of them, as Happy’s former caddie. That might be more than a cameo, though. Beyond that, I’d have to go with Boban Marjanović as Happy’s former boss’s son as my favourite and Eminem as the son of “jackass” as the worst. I really wanted to highlight the other movies, though, because other cameos in 2025 were forgotten once Happy Gilmore 2 dropped.

Happy Gilmore 2 was also nominated in the category of Trends of 2025 due to it and One Battle After Another both using Tom Petty music over the end credits. However, it lost to Children’s Characters Turned into Slasher Villains because of how many there were. Movies like Bambi: The Reckoning, Popeye the Slayer Man, Popeye’s Revenge, Mouseboat Massacre, Screamboat, Mouse of Horrors, Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare, Pinocchio: Unstrung, and Shiver Me Timbers. There were so many. How could that not win?

Playing to the Crowd

There are singular moments in movies clearly made to get the audience to sort of do that Leonardo DiCaprio point from Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. You know the ones. Those spoof movies of the mid-to-late 2000s were all about those moments. This award celebrates those moments. It is similar to Nostalgia for Nostalgia’s Sake, except the movies aren’t necessarily pulling on those nostalgic strings with these moments. They’re just making references. There’s a difference.

This award didn’t exist last year. But I wanted to add it to celebrate those referential moments that don’t necessarily pull from decades past for nostalgic reasons. Sure, nostalgia played into a couple of the nominees. Most of it was more recent, though. Here are the nominees:

• Den of Thieves 2: Pantera – Fuck the Police
• How to Train Your Dragon – Casting Gerard Butler to play his animated character in live action.
• Love Hurts – The Goonies reunion between Ke Huy Quan and Sean Astin.
• M3GAN 2.0 – Dance scene at the convention.
• Jay Kelly – Using George Clooney movie clips for Jay Kelly tribute.

The winner of Playing to the Crowd for 2025 is M3GAN 2.0. People loved the dance from the first movie, so they felt the need to insert a dance into the second movie. Was it natural to the story? Sure, but not completely. And that’s what made it the perfect winner for the award. It was something that was clearly only put into the movie to play to the same people who made the dance from the first movie into a viral TikTok phenomenon. They played to the audience even if they didn’t get the audience back.

M3GAN 2.0 lost one of the other awards that I liked but didn’t want to give a full section to. The award for Best Robot Character instead went to my favourite robot of the year. That robot was Taco Bot from The Electric State. I don’t know why that’s my favourite robot of 2025, but it is. Taco Bot was great and I was sad when he got killed near the end of the movie. So sad.

That Boy Can Daaaaaaaance!

Dance scenes can bring a story to a complete halt for a few minutes. Sure, there are movies where the story is the dance. There are movies where the dance scenes do character work or are a distraction to get something else done outside the dancing. A lot of the time, dance scenes feel like a break, though. A dance break that may not be break dancing.

That feeling of having a random dance break was only part of what went into choosing this award. It was mostly just my favourite dance moment of the year for a few reasons. Memorable, amusing, random… All sorts of things went into choosing the winner. Here are the nominees:

• M3GAN 2.0 – The dance at the convention that was clearly inserted to try and replicate the viral dance from the first.
• Companion – The cut to the Lil Boo Thang dance made me laugh so much.
• Heads of State – The Belarusians dancing by their car was such a random moment that I couldn’t help but be amused.
• The Life of Chuck – Almost the entire second act of the story was a dance scene.
• The Accountant 2 – Line dancing with a memorable song.

And the winner of That Boy Can Daaaaaaaance! for 2025 was Companion. It might not have been the longest dance. It was quick and comedic and has stuck with me for the year or so since I watched the movie. The callback was good, too.

A similar award was the award for Singing in a Non-Musical, where a character sang in a movie that wasn’t a musical. Pretty straight forward, right? There was some skatting in The Naked Gun and half an album sung in Opus. Jack Black did his thing in A Minecraft Movie. But I’m going to give the award to Friendship for having all the guys singing My Boo. The whole feel of that scene brought things together. Perfection.

Now I’m going to go over a few awards quick that I can’t go too deep into because they would spoil things. You will get an award name and a very short winner.

• Best Death – The Monkey, pool
• There Were Consequences – Novocaine
• Unearned Ending – Hell House LLC: Lineage

Yeah, that will do it for those ones. Let’s move to the next big award.

Biggest Laugh

There’s nothing like a good joke in a movie to keep me coming back. It doesn’t matter the genre. There could be the most serious drama, but one joke got written into the middle of it that just nailed that comedic timing or contrast. It’s a special thing. When you nail a joke, it can go a long way.

Not all my nominees in this category were comedy movies. In fact, only one of them might have been a full on comedy. Even then, it was a dark comedy thriller. All I can say is that these moments had me howling. Here are the nominees:

• Weapons – The running and screaming bit. You know if you watched it.
• Companion – Lil Boo Thang. That song was so out of nowhere, and they called back to it later.
• Avatar: Fire and Ash – The nonchalant way Papa Dragon said “That’s not cool” when he got cut while tripping.
• Friendship – Subway. His whole drug dream was ordering a sub. Makes me laugh just thinking about it.
• Fountain of Youth – Oasis’s Live Forever in the end credits. Funny to me because my former boss was obsessed with Oasis.

I’m not sure how I don’t give Biggest Laugh to Friendship. That really was the biggest laugh, and I debated throwing multiple jokes from that movie into the nominees here. It was perfect Tim Robinson rage at something so mundane and ridiculous.

This award kind of went hand in hand with Biggest Laugh. It’s like a cousin of it. The Road House 2024 Memorial Throwaway Joke Award of 2025 was named after the Road House joke from 2024 where, while having his head slammed against a piano, Jake Gyllenhaal said “This piano sounds out of tune.” What an odd joke to toss into the middle of a fight scene that didn’t matter. This year? The Road House 2024 Memorial Throwaway Joke Award of 2025 will be going to Novocaine. In the middle of a fight in a kitchen, the main character threw a bag of flower at the bad guy. It exploded on the bad guy’s head and the main character said “You don’t have, like, a gluten thing, do you?” Perfect throwaway joke.

This Character Was Rated G for Children

You know the characters I’m talking about with this award. This is dedicated to the characters who were clearly made to appeal to children and sell merchandise. Characters similar to Grogu (who might be up for the award next year) from The Mandalorian or Gizmo from Gremlins. That cute little tagalong who might not be the main character but is always there with them. Or there with them for a good amount of time.

Not all this year’s nominees originated in the movies they were in. I think only one of them did, actually. One came from a TV show, one came from a book, one came from a comic, and one came from another movie. They all fit the criteria, though. Let’s see the nominees:

• The Fantastic Four: First Steps – H.E.R.B.I.E.
• Jurassic World Rebirth – Dolores
• The Electric State – Cosmo
• How to Train Your Dragon – Toothless
• Superman – Kosmo

This was a tough race. Kosmo won the hearts of many. Toothless was the good boy we all wished we had. H.E.R.B.I.E. was literally made for children in the 60s as a replacement for the Human Torch, who television producers didn’t want children copying. However, This Character Was Rated G for Children is going to Dolores because she’s the one I think of immediately when I think of this category.

That award was similar to my new category for Best Bestie, which is the best best friend character of the year. It was an easy choice for me because I only really think of Sensei from One Battle After Another when I think of this award for 2025. Had to go to him over all the rest.

Interesting Setting

Some movies like to dive into certain sides of society that we don’t normally see. They move beyond the mobster and high school and Hollywood stories that are told time and time again. The curtain gets pulled back to shine a light on something new. That’s what this award celebrates. It awards movies that look at those lesser-seen areas.

This was a new category to this year. I saw enough movies that went to interesting places that I wanted to highlight them. I wanted to let people know about the interesting, different settings of the movies. Here they are:

• Relay – The relay phone system
• A Minecraft Movie – Overworld (the mines)
• Dead Mail – Post office
• Train Dreams – Pacific Northwest logging in the early 1900s
• The Fantastic Four: First Steps – Retro futuristic 1960s

This award really came down to two movies, Relay and Dead Mail. In the end, I gave it to Dead Mail. It took a look at the post office in a way I never expected. There’s mail that does not have an address, either to send or return. The whole mystery/conflict began in the office for that dead mail, where the worker found a mysterious envelope and started digging into what that dead mail could mean. Congratulations Dead Mail.

Almost completely unrelated is the James Bond Honorary Villain Award, an award for a villain with a quirky trait that could fit right into a James Bond movie. There were a few nominees this year, but I ended up giving the award to Raven, a villain in Love Hurts who wrote poetry about his killings. I could see that fitting into a James Bond movie if done right. Threatening poems to taunt 007 when people get killed around him. Yeah, that could work.

I Can’t Believe It’s Not Disney

The public domain has made it so that there are a lot of characters, or specific versions of characters, that can now be used by anybody. In the past few years, characters like Mickey Mouse, Winnie-the-Pooh, Bambi, and Popeye have made it into the public domain. People have gone wild with horror movie adaptations of these characters. That brought about this award.

Not every movie in this category was a horror adaptation. For the award, I went a little wider in scope. I went with movies whose titles or premises sounded inherently Disney. Or the horror movies. Anything that could, in one way or another, be interpreted as Disney. You’ll understand when you see these nominees:

• Mickey 17 – Mickey is in the title
• Mouseboat Massacre – Horror movie based on Mickey Mouse
• How to Train Your Dragon – Was Dreamworks, but felt like a Disney story, too
• Bambi: The Reckoning – Horror movie based on Bambi
• Good Boy – A movie about a dog

I Can’t Believe It’s Not Disney will be going to none other than Bambi: The Reckoning. There were so many Mickey Mouse horror movies in the past year, but did people know there was a Bambi one, too? That’s why I think it might be more unbelievable.

And even though Good Boy might have lost that award, it did win the award for Goodest Good Boy. I mean, how could it not? Good Boy was about a good boy who protected his owner from evil spirits of some sort. It starred a real dog. Yeah, that was the right winner.

Worst CGI Animal

Following an award involving a real dog, I want to look at bad fake animals. This is the award for Worst CGI Animal. The title is pretty straight-forward. Movies don’t always employ real animals because, much like with people, the scenes might be too dangerous to do with everything being practical. But the deviation from practical animals might make things look super fake in a way that the entertainment can’t counter.

A bunch of this year’s nominees were animals that required CGI to even exist in their respective movies. Superhero dogs, mythical or extinct creatures. That sort of stuff. Here are the nominees:

• Death of a Unicorn – Unicorns
• Superman – Krypto
• Jurassic World Rebirth – Tall Dinosaurs in Valley
• Bambi: The Reckoning – Bambi
• Train Dreams – Bear

The winner of Worst CGI Animal was Train Dreams with the bear during the forest fire. I didn’t choose it because it was the only animal that didn’t need CGI but was CGI. I chose it because the rest of the movie was so stunning, a visual feast for thine eyes, but that one shot of the bear coming out of the burnt forest and turning to look at the main character was so offputting. One bad looking moment in a nearly visually perfect movie. The other nominees didn’t feel as out of place.

If that wasn’t a hint enough, Train Dreams also took home That Scenery Was Beautiful. It was an amazing movie to look at. The tall trees. The valleys they built train trestles over. The train tunnels. The giant, cut down logs the workers sat on. The forest fire. The plane. Everything was breathtakingly beautiful.

You Can’t Stop the Metal

We’re into the final three awards. For this year, at least. Next year could be even bigger. I don’t know. You Can’t Stop the Metal is an award named after a Tenacious D song. The award covers a wide swath of things. This is very much a vibes award. I can’t even tell you specifically what constitutes a nominee for this award outside of it having something to do with metal. And then I pick the one I feel is most fitting. Try to replicate that, why don’t you?

The nominees this year are quite varied. Remember, anything metal could be a part of the award. Anything. Take note of that with these nominees:

• The Electric State – All those robots fighting the humans
• A House of Dynamite – There’s a missile headed for Chicago!
• The Fantastic Four: First Steps – Silver Surfer was on them the whole time
• Final Destination: Bloodlines – That MRI machine got so magnetic
• M3GAN 2.0 – A killer robot going after a killer robot

I’m not sure why I didn’t include this last year, when Deaner 89 would have won for the metal attitude of the main character. It was in my spreadsheet, but I left it out of the post. Anyway, this year’s award goes to Final Destination: Bloodlines. Not only did that death involve metal, but the line “You don’t fuck with death” is also super metal.

The second last award is That Was an Experience, an award that goes to a movie not necessarily because of the quality of the story or anything. But it puts you into a place or situation that makes you feel almost like you’re there, experiencing the same thing. F1 came close to winning this award, but I had to give it to Warfare. I haven’t been in war before. Yet, I feel like Warfare perfectly captured what it feels like to be in the middle of a pointless firefight. It was rough and real in a way that I don’t think any other war movies have really captured.

Paul Blart Memorial Award

Here we are. The final award for 2025. At least, the final one I’ll be putting into this post. It’s the one that most captures who I am. I’ve been a champion of Paul Blart: Mall Cop since I first saw it. It’s a better movie than people give it credit for. Some people think I’m crazy for standing by it all these years. That’s what this award is meant to capture.

I gave the award to Kraven the Hunter last year, a movie I stand by as not being nearly as bad as people think it is. It got a bad reputation because it was part of that maligned Spider-Man villain universe that Sony made. People didn’t like Madame Web and didn’t like Morbius, so they were quick to write off Kraven the Hunter. Except Kraven the Hunter was fun enough. It wasn’t anything amazing, but it was still a half-decent superhero flick.

Now it’s time to figure out which movie I’ll champion the most out of the 84 movies I’ve seen so far from 2025. Which one do I feel that people think is worse than it actually is? Which one do I like more than most people? Do I think there’s a movie that is good that nobody else does? Those are the questions I have to answer as I choose from these nominees:

• The Electric State
• Fountain of Youth
• Captain America: Brave New World
• Opus
• Jurassic World Rebirth

Like last year, this was an award I went into thinking I knew the winner. I was pretty sure I was going to give it to Fountain of Youth. I heard a bunch of negativity about it. I saw it on a bunch of worst of lists for the year. However, I changed my mind when thinking about it a little more. It’s not that I don’t like the movie. My thoughts weren’t about my feelings towards it. No no. I thought about my experiences over the past few months.

There was one movie I’ve already actively been trying to talk up when people say it’s not good. There’s a movie I’ve already been defending because it worked so well for me. Remembering all that, I had to switch the winner. Captain America: Brave New World might not be the best movie. It might not even be the best Marvel movie of 2025. But it was a fun 90s political thriller throwback, and a solid continuation of the series that gave us Captain America: The Winter Soldier. That 90s political thriller feel was what made it click with me, and it’s what will have me defending Captain America: Brave New World so hard going forward. A worthy winner of my most personal award.

With that, after 22 Word document pages of writing and over 9000 words, I’m bringing my 2026 Movie Awards to a close. I’ve gone through a whole bunch of awards with a whole bunch of movies. I don’t even know if I mentioned all 84 movies I watched from 2025. There were a bunch of awards I didn’t go over that were in my spreadsheet. Awards that I’ve moved on from throughout the year. Awards that only came in last minute, so I didn’t get a proper selection of nominees.

As of right now, the end of March in 2026, I’ve cut a bunch of awards out of my spreadsheet for next year. I cut out stuff like Best Prime Video Movie, Best Netflix Movie, Best Horror, and Best Action Movie. I cut out a bunch of acting awards where I was just like “Movies Featuring Actors From [insert property here].”  A few awards about titles were taken out. I wanted to make things more fun, more personal, and that involved getting rid of some of the more boring awards.

There are still a bunch of awards that I haven’t included in this specific post. If you want to see some more of the awards, some of the stuff that didn’t make it into this super extended post, let me know. I’ll write another one, a shorter one, that includes some of the other awards. I didn’t do that last year, but I’ll never say never to that.

I hope you enjoyed the 2025 awards. They’ve been fun to put together. A little less fun to write, but only because I’ve been going at this for a few weeks now. Bit by bit. I’ve already been putting together my nominees for 2026 with every release I’ve watched. Give it about a year and I’ll have another monster-sized post for you with more movies. Until then, I’ll keep watching and I’ll keep writing, and I hope you’ll join me on my journey.