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Announcing the Winners of the 2024 Peely Awards for the Worst in Pop Culture

Hello, folks, and welcome to the end of the 2024 Peely Awards! After two weeks of voting, nominating, and selecting categories, we’re pleased to finally announce the winners in our award show about the worst of the worst.

Perhaps this was the year of—at least, for pop culture—the mighty falling. You had mass layoffs, gigantic financial failures, and so, so many things whose reach went well too far. Companies like Apple, Netflix, Ubisoft and more stuck their hand to the fire and got burned. So many “too big to fail” projects broke that adage and collapsed. And what we were left with was ridiculous and irritating and at times surreal in their failings.

The biggest example, and one of the greatest flops in the history of the entertainment industry, was Concord. Sony’s online shooter was supposed to be the vanguard of a new era for the company, one defined less by sumptuous, award-winning stories but forever games that make oodles of money. They had a dozen of these planned; they forced several of their beloved studios on this track and pinched others, like Concord’s Firewalk or Destiny and Halo creator Bungie, to reshape their brand. And this one got so much attention. It would, in theory, generate not merely profit but pure growth. Instead, after six to eight years of work and over two hundred million dollars, it spent its hype cycle castigated as an irritating ripoff before a release so bad that it was killed after a couple weeks. The servers were taken down, refunds given, and all copies of the game patched to be unusable. Firewalk was fired, set adrift in an unstable industry with nothing but lessons and skills that may never be used. Concord came up a lot at this year’s Peely’s because it had to. It was—and “was” is the operative word, as the game became fully unplayable and inaccessible within a month of existence—a massive, top-down failure of cosmic proportions. Fiascoes like this are once in a generation, though I have a sneaking suspicion that we’ll be seeing more and more of them in the years to come.
But Concord was just one thing. Television, film, sports, music, and the rest of the entertainment landscape had so many failures. Borderlands, Sony’s expanded Spider-Man villain movies, and basically everything Drake did were asinine public embarrassments. Eesh, there was so much art stinking up our screens, stores, and channels. But making fun of them can be fun, and as it turns out, the lot of you are pretty good at making fun! We’ve always tried to push the Peely’s to be witty and zany and thoughtful, a counterbalance to the disreputable likes of the Razzie’s. This year, as in every year, you showed that. So without further ado, our list of winners and four finalists. Well, more finalists if there was a tie for fifth place.

Our “Winners!” (all votes tallied by early afternoon January 2)

01: The Gold-Plated Lifetime Tom Welling Award for Worst Performance (Merve)

  • We hate to say it and didn’t think she’d ever make it here, but Cate Blanchett has the worst performance in Borderlands, a movie with absolutely no good performances. It is shocking and tragic how bored and lifeless she is (16)
  • Angourie Rice’s singing in Mean Girls: the Musical (9)
  • Jon Voight, Megalopolis (8)
  • Kevin Hart as Roland, Borderlands (6)
  • Jack Black as Claptrap, Borderlands (4)

02: The “Ian Holm IS Rook” Award for Most Uncanny Valley Use of Special Effects (El Santo)

  • Naturally, the disturbing AI Ian Holm as Rook, Alien: Romulus (22)
  • Any time a character in Wicked goes outside and you have to think about what the sky looks like- a brown digital smear. Bonus negative points for “The Wizard and I” where she sings dramatically and runs outside into the smudgy brown sky (15)
  • The trailers for A Minecraft Movie (12)
  • The opening fight scene of Deadpool & Wolverine, where the hero looks entirely CGI (9)

03: The Prequel to a Remake of a Tie-In Miniseries Masquerading as an Original Idea Award for the Least Essential Sequel, Prequel, Remake, Spinoff, or other Form of IP Extension (Mr Ixolite)

  • The Willy Wonka Experience (24)
  • Moana 2 (20)
  • Eli Roth’s Borderlands is so bad it made us slightly kinder to games we’ve hated for over a decade straight. On the bright side, it inspired our community to watch James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy and remember that it’s still really good ten years later despite its many bad imitators, a roster of which Borderlands may the bottom of the barrel (20)
  • Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire (20)
  • Kraven: The Hunter (12)

04: Kraven for a Win Award for the Most Unnecessary, Unasked-For Piece of Media to be Released (Ninjaneer, MacCrocodile)

  • Mufasa (50)
  • Moana 2 (20)
  • Oh my god we totally forgot there was a remake of The Crow! (19)
  • Madame Web (13)
  • Remember last year when we kept talking about Captain Laserhawk, that abominable and inscrutable Ubisoft crossover anime? The one with a frog assassin from Assassin’s Creed and Rayman as a fascist propagandist who snorts coke off of cow ladies? Well, that got a game! And guess what? Captain Laserhawk: The G.A.M.E. is entirely about collecting NFTs! (12)

05: The Ubisoft Game-imatic Universe Award for Most Irritating or Perplexing Act of Product Crossover, Cross-Promotion, or Brand Integration (Wolfman Jew, Skipskatte)

  • Funko Fusion, a video game that turns those hideous Funko Pop toys into actual characters for a, by all accounts, unbelievably bland third-person shooter. Now you no longer have to imagine what would happen if a grimly-proportioned, bug-eyed Skeletor hung out with a grimly-proportioned, bug-eyed Marty McFly! (23)
  • Secret Level, an Amazon video game TV anthology. While the show is ostensibly a celebration of the past forty years of gaming, it’s actually a full-throated advertisement and little else. Adaptations of true classics like Mega Man and Spelunky are eclipsed by episodes that exist as extended cinematic trailers for video games that aren’t even out yet—and in one case, an edgy Pac-Man story, one that hadn’t even been announced until after the episode aired. The two most egregious examples both come from Sony: an episode that exists to sell us on Concord two months after Concord‘s epochal failure and delisting and an episode that’s just an ad for the PlayStation brand (21)
  • Tiana’s Bayou Adventure not featuring Dr. Facilier or “Friends on the Other Side” in any capacity (12)
  • This award was named after Ubisoft’s very strange attempts to forge a shared universe out of their properties, which comprise the likes of Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry, the Tom Clancy brand, and some family friendly cartoon characters. This reached a peak last year with the horrible Netflix anime Captain Laserhawk, but their major stab in 2024 was the XDefiant, a dying live service shooter that brings together the Tom Clancy’s games, Watch Dogs, and more into something of a sludge. It didn’t really work, and it highlights that despite having a lot of similar characters and systems, there’s not really a coherence to the company brand and trying to forge one leads only to madness (12)
  • The inexplicable product placement in the trailer for Naughty Dog’s new game Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet. Sony crap in Sony games is nothing new, but a Porsche spaceship and a heroine in Adidas gear? Is this realism? An extension of the “80s never ended” idea? Or just subsidizing an expensive game for an expensive console. We’re excited for the game, but man (11)

06: Most Obnoxious Television Commercial (Please refrain from including political ads here) (Tigercat919)

  • YouTube ads for YouTube ad blockers, which go out of their way to fake a “skip” button (22)
  • Was that iPhone commercial with a hydraulic press crushing a bunch of toys and art supplies because they’re obsolete compared to a smartphone this year? (20)
  • Zach Braff, Donald Faison, and Jason Momoa singing “What A Feeling” for T-Mobile (18)
    • Of course, Snoop Dogg also had his own terrible T-Mobile ads, too. Banner year for the company
  • The “He Gets Us” ads for Jesus (18)
  • Amazon’s singing janitor (16)

Not that it needs it, but Concord deserves a Lifetime Achievement Award for its obnoxious commercial, which might have been the single biggest nail in its coffin and is a central part of its story of abject failure. And hey! It even got a second one in that Secret Level advertisement show.

07: Too Many Fingers in a Sinister Soup Award for Worst Commercial, Billboard, or Piece of Advertising Trying to Sell Us on the Benefits of AI (dollymix)

  • There was an animated Coca-Cola Christmas ad that proudly proclaimed it was done by AI. We’re not sure why they wanted to boast about it, as it looked like absolute dogshit (37)
  • The Olympics ad with the AI letter to a favorite athlete (33)
  • The one where the guy is supposed to summarize some documents for a meeting but didn’t realize it so he has the AI generate a summary of them. If anything, it feels like the ad is about how easy it is to replace jobs like his, so maybe it’s actually for bosses eager to use AI to facilitate layoffs (25)
  • Dunking on Elon is overdone, but let’s give a shout out to Twitter’s AI, which proudly goes by the name Grok. Grok. Yeah, who doesn’t want to get help from… Grok for looking up recipes and getting the local sports scores? (16)

08: Monetized and Scrutinized Award for Worst Corporate Malfeasance (Ninjaneer)

  • Disney pulling plotlines about trans characters from two separate streaming shows this year (40)
  • In an interview, Ubisoft head of subscriptions Phillippe Tremblay brags about how streaming and subscription services are great because they make people comfortable with not owning the products they buy (33)
  • Warner Bros. canceling Sesame Street (31)
  • GameStop canceling Game Informer two-thirds through their latest issue, firing everyone, and then shutting down the website to erase thirty-three years of reviews, interviews, features and more (30)
  • Netflix execs telling screenwriters to “have this character announce what they’re doing so that viewers who have this program on in the background can follow along” (15)

We’d also like to give a Lifetime Achievement Award to Take-Two here, for both CEO Strauss Zelnick boasts about how the FTC’s antitrust regulation will be completely defanged under the new administration and the publisher’s delisting of Spec Ops: The Line, one of the most important video games of the past twenty years and an essential part of the video game canon.

09: Dungeonized and Dragonized Award for Worst Corporate Malfeasance (Hasbro / Wizards of the Coast Division) (LibraryLass)

  • Laying off over 100 employees just before the holidays, including WotC’s Creator Relations Associate for D&D, Dixon Dubow– the person responsible for convincing the C-suite to walk back their attempt to revoke the Open Gaming License in 2023 and the primary point of contact between content creators and WOTC for years (25)
  • Repeated prevarication about their AI policy, including but not limited to forbidding AI-generated text or illustration on the part of their freelancers while publicly admitting to planning to using AI in future D&D adventures and MtG cards and hiring a “Chief AI engineer” to that end (21)
  • Tangential, but Elon Musk throwing a tantrum and threatening to buy Hasbro entirely after the 50th anniversary coffee table book correctly noted that by modern standards Gary Gygax was racist and sexist (20)
  • Calling in copyright strikes on Youtube against D&D content creators that were given explicit permission to preview the new PHB after the review embargo ended (18)
  • D&D franchise and product VP Jess Lanzillo straight up admitting in an interview that 5e2024’s designers intend for the character options in the corebook to be underpowered relative to supplements in order to drive sales of the supplements (13)
  • Chris Cao, WOTC’s VP of Digital game development’s credible sexual harassment allegations going totally unacknowledged (13)

10: Serial Cruller Thriller Award for Worst New Food (Shit-Master Slootfass)

  • Lunchly, MrBeast’s Lunachable’s killer that’s full of mold (38)
  • Taco Bell’s nostalgia menu, for failing to include the Grilled Stuft Burrito (11)
  • The General Mills Kelce Mix (2)

11: Next Time On! Award for the Mulitpart Streaming Series that, More than Any Other, Should Probably Have Just Been A Two Hour-Long Movie (El Santo)

  • Not a show, but Wicked splitting itself into two parts… and then having Part 1 be 160 minutes long, including extended heavy pauses and a digression about WHAT COLOR THE BRICK ROAD SHOULD BE (40)
  • The Acolyte (31)
  • Knuckles, which might’ve been able to actually show its title character if it only had fewer than 100 minutes to fill (19)
  • Dune Prophecy (6) 
  • True Detective: Night Country (5)
  • Murder at the End of the World (5)

12: Most Late To The Party Trend Chaser (Shit-Master Slootfass)

  • And here’s another one for Concord. It is an Overwatch clone years after the bubble on hero shooters burst, with knockoff Guardians of the Galaxy energy well after the backlash to that style. It is a game whose appeal largely extends to do very large cultural touchstones, except largely worse and less memorable. Its failure was inevitable—what’s surprising is just how soon it self-destructed (23)
  • For a strange example: Marvel Rivals, which is actually very successful but was yet another Overwatch clone that came out after Concord (4)
  • Toro y Moi abandoning his chillwave style to release a trap album in 2024 (2)

13: The Best in Excess Award for Biggest Belly Flop of a Live Service (Wolfman Jew)

  • Concord is one of the single biggest financial disasters in the history of the entertainment industry. It cost well over $200 million, took eight years, and only lasted two weeks before Sony destroyed it, not merely ending its servers but patching copies to make it permanently unplayable. Concord is not a game; Concord was a game, existing only in the past tense. The sheer scale of its failure is astronomical and absolutely unheard of in the games industry (36)
  • Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League. After Batman: Arkham Knight ended the Arkham games on a bloated whimper, Rocksteady spent an entire fucking decade making a Suicide Squad game that played to exactly none of their strengths, was awash in the trappings of horrible live service game design, and is ending all its online support after a year (22)
  • It hasn’t folded—yet—but the return of Warner Bros.’ Super Smash Bros. clone MultiVersus. It took a year off to regroup after a huge launch that petered out, only for its relaunch to largely fall flat. Moving to a new game engine led to a game that was rougher and less polished than what was an already pretty limp Smash ripoff (14)
  • Ubisoft had a crossover shooter called XDefiant which almost launched last year but couldn’t because it couldn’t even pass certification. It finally did launch in May and quite successfully, but of course it ultimately died a hard, fast death when it couldn’t keep momentum. Most of its lifespan was spent by its leads actively denying that it was clearly doomed (9)
  • Foamstars! Square Enix made a team-based shooter about shooting foam. It spent much of its life being compared to Nintendo’s delightful Splatoon, only to actually release to terrible reviews, poor retention, and an ultimately truncated series of updates (5)

14: The Rest in Excess Award for Biggest Belly Flop of Entertainment Product that Was Not a Live Service (Ninjaneer)

  • Joker 2, which cost an insane amount of money and didn’t even come close to the first one’s runaway success. Given the content, it feels richly deserved (41)
  • The one-two punch of the Katy Perry’s “Woman’s World” video and the video that may have disturbed an ecological site without permission (28)
  • Megalopolis, less for its obscene $100 million dollar production and more for how it brought Francis Ford Coppola’s nastier attitudes to light (23)
  • Argylle (7)
  • The alleged fastest-selling D&D edition ever couldn’t even move 4000 hard copies in a month (5)

15: The Jenga Tower that is Capitalism Award for Most Absurd Corporate Self-Destruction (Wolfman Jew)

  • Zaslav and Warner Bros. shelving Coyote vs. Acme, spending most of the year holding it hostage for possible studios to pay for it, only to destroy it anyway (40)
  • Twitter’s continued spiral into oblivion (27)
  • Sony’s minor Spider-Man villain film franchise, which bookended 2024 with Madame Web at the start and Kraven: The Hunter at the end (hence the latter’s general lack of presence at these awards) (27)
    • We’d also like to point out Sony’s games division, which has been attempting to pivot from beloved single player adventures into live services and is suffering horrific consequences as a result.
  • Does Drake suing his own label to try and squash Kendrick Lamar count? (17)
  • Ubisoft rushing Star Wars Outlaws out the door and its consequences seems like it might be the last nail in the coffin for the long-blighted abusive megacorp in its current form (16)
  • Microsoft Gaming shutting down Alpha Dog, Arkane Austin, and Tango Gameworks, and their shifting, inconsistent, stupid explanations for why they did so that followed (8)

16: The War of the Indistinguishable Bearded Men Award for Most Inscrutable YouTuber/Twitch Streamer Drama (Merve)

  • Last year, James Somerton was a finalist in a Peely over his plagiarist behavior. Well, the fallout over that has been… something, involving his releasing, on the same day, both a fake suicide note and a photograph of his anus (35)
  • Johnny Somali being hunted by every citizen in South Korea (11)
  • Kind of niche but the brief beef between a pair of British-based delivery YouTubers, London Eats and London Hustle, wherein the former accused the latter of buying subscribers (7)
  • The Dropout / Smosh Zionism controversy (3)
  • The team formerly known as Buzzfeed Unsolved got into a lot of heat when they wanted to be like Dropout and make their own streaming service while also implying to their fans that their past videos would no longer be free (2)

17: Sawing off the Leg on Which You Stand Award for Most Exhausting Culture War Battle, Something so Banal that It Just Smothers You With Embarrassment (Diptera)

  • The massive and ceaseless surge of reactionary, anti-woke response to art and entertainment that deign to have minority leads, queer themes, or even the most surface level depiction of diversity. Bonus points to all the corporations that either fully buckle under this wave or try to make nice with it (45)
  • The entire cycle of reactionaries championing Stellar Blade as an “antidote” to Woke Games because you play a sexy lady in skimpy costumes… only to turn on it because a couple costumes have slightly more fabric in the full game compared to the demo (23)
  • The increased polarization of the WNBA (18)
  • That the “vaccines cause autism” conspiracy is still doing on (16)
  • All the sturm and drang about the Acolyte repeating all the sturm and drang about the Sequel Trilogy for something that ended up being significantly more mid than even the worst of the ST (11)

18: The “Please Touch Grass” Award for Worst Fan Behavior (Antler Queen Carson Shaw)

  • Buying a Cybertruck (37)
  • Star Wars fans toxic doxxing of The Acolyte’s stars (34)
  • We could say everything Chappell Roan has gone through but specifically about a month ago when “fans” doxxed her high school boyfriend (29)
  • Those two jagoff Yankees fans that directly interfered with Mookie Betts trying to catch a fly ball in the World Series (19)
  • The review-bombing of shows with queer moments/episodes, including (but obviously not limited to) the House of the Dragon episode “Smallfolk” (18)

19: Oh No, They Have Been Here for Years Award for Worst Comeback Attempt, Whether Successful or Not (Shit-Master Slootfass)

  • “Edgy Adult Jojo Siwa,” calling herself the CEO of gay pop and pretending to jerk off on stage while dressed as a construction worker (35)
  • Justin Timberlake (34)
  • Katy Perry (32)
  • Aaron Rodgers (7)
  • Brooke Shields in Mother of the Bride (3)

20: The Torment Nexus Award for Worst Analysis, Take, or Misrepresentation of Pop Culture (Antler Queen Carson Shaw)

  • Vivek Ramaswamy heralding Whiplash as something aspirational while explaining to America that they’re too dumb and expensive to hire and immigrants will work for pennies (45)
  • One of the original members of The Village People—the cop, perhaps unsurprisingly—saying at us that “YMCA” is not a gay song, and he will sue anyone who says it is (42)
  • Rich White guy MrBeast seeing Squid Games and thinking “lemme rebrand that as my own thing” aka Beast Games (40)
    • We’d also be remiss to not point out Netflix themselves making a real life Squid Games.
  • JD Vance quoting Anton Chigurh approvingly while not seeming to realize that he was a fictional character who’d been written as a complete monster (29)
  • Does Donald Trump know Hannibal Lecter isn’t real? (22)
  • Armond White says Wicked will turn your kids trans. Paraphrasing? Only slightly. We’ll spare you the link (18)

21: WFAN Radio Award for Most Dysfunctional Sports Team (Tigercat919)

  • The New York Jets have the owner’s kid making decisions based on Madden ratings (30)
  • I mean, it’s gotta be the White Sox, right? (22)
  • The Seattle Mariners for blowing a 10 game division lead and missing the playoffs yet again. And then refusing once again to sign any free agents to try and improve the roster (15)
  • Chicago Bears by a mile. I’ve seen bad Bears teams before but not this level of disaster and can’t even blame the QB (10)
  • The Australian Olympics breakdancing (7)
  • North Carolina football has real potential in the current CFB landscape, and with the right hire could be regularly competing for the ACC and thus an auto berth in the playoffs. Instead they’re gonna let Bill Belichick install his son as head coach in a scheme that blatantly violates North Carolina nepotism laws, but laws are fake (6)

22: Worst or Most Catastrophic Non-Gambling or Sports Betting Aspect of Sports (presented by Draftkings Sportsbook) (Tigercat919 / Eagle Hand Laundry)

  • The “controversy” over the Algerian boxer supposedly being trans, ignoring proof she’s cis and the tiny fact that Algeria is about the last nation that would send a trans athlete to the Olympics (50)
  • Harrison Butker’s racist, sexist and anti-LGBTQ commencement speech (37)
  • The infiltration of racists into normally progressive and tolerant WNBA spaces (27)
  • Aaron Rodgers (25)
  • Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson (24)
  • The death of the Oakland A’s (24)

23: The Feral Farrell from Beyond the Stars Award for Most Baffling, Banal, or Boneheaded Plot Twist or Ending (Michael Weyer). Note that most of these we’ll deliberately keep spoiled. Not Joker 2, though. I think you deserve to know how that one ends.

24: The JK Rowling Award for Worst Egregious Celebrity Behavior (Antler Queen Carson Shaw)

  • Elon Musk’s entire public (and private) persona (54)
  • The namesake, as always (31)
  • Justin Baldoni hiring a PR firm to start a smear campaign against Blake Lively on social media (31)
  • Zachary Levi descending into the right wing sphere to the point where he spreads baseless conspiracy theory about Gavin Creel (28)
  • Diddy, Jay-Z, et all. All celebrity rapists (26)

25: The Jimmy Buffett Murder Mysteries Award for the Existent Work of Art that is, in a Very Tangible Way and More Than Any Other, Not a Real Work of Art. Not Parody, But also Not Real (Kim Cardassian, Michael Weyer)

  • Red One (24)
  • You can’t convince us they actually made a Joker sequel musical with Lady Gaga. It’s a large-scale Dad’s Casa thing (18)
  • The namesake of this category is for Murdaritaville, a Jimmy Buffet themed slasher about a literal parrothead killing people (15)
  • Argylle (6)
  • The Beekeeper (2)
  • Atlas, the Jennifer Lopez Netflix movie (2)

26: The Musically Disinclined Award for Dumbest Musical Number for a Work of Art or Live Event (Owen)

  • All the songs in Mean Girls, particularly “Sexy,” for having zero percussion and therefore sounding like they’re performed on top of air (11)
  • The song in Emilia Perez about gender reassignment surgery, written in English by a French guy for Spanish actors, that plays like someone put a bunch of sexual anatomy terms through Google Translate (11)
  • Snoop Dogg’s somnambulant cover of “Thank You” by Sly and the Family Stone at the Game Awards (11)
  • “Can I Have a Chee Hoo?” from Moana 2, for trying to make the word “Chee Hoo” not embarrassing (10)
  • Kid Rock performing during the last evening of the RNC (9)
  • All the songs in Joker 2 that take place against a featureless black background (9)

27: The 10,000 Likes for New Music Award for Worst / Most Severely Backfired Music Promotion (Bresson)

  • The trend of refurbishing Airbnbs to mimic the homes of dead musicians (32)
  • Jennifer Lopez “This Is Me…Now” A documentary about how happy her new marriage to Ben Affleck is, months before they filed for divorce, as advertising for a concert tour for her new material that then turned into a Greatest Hits Tour (and I think dropped the “now”) and then cancelled altogether due to lack of ticket sales (26)
  • The Black Keys crypto funded concert where most of the audience was sat behind them (25)
  • Katy Perry’s new album (17)
  • Drake suing UMG and Spotify accusing them of having bots upped the numbers for Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us”, which created a Streisand Effect and made people listen to “Not Like Us” more (15)

28: The Cringing Like It’s Going Out of Style Award for Most Accidentally Offensive Message, Moral, or Theme (Owen)

  • Mean Girls (2024) biffing it by making Janis explicitly queer but in doing so kinda fucking over the original Mean Girls messaging about the bullying original GNC but not queer Janice received (22)
  • Joker 2 angrily, viscerally insults the first film’s audience as its main and possibly only actual idea (21)
  • Emilia Perez accidentally misgendering its own main character one million times before blowing her up in a car explosion to show what a Heroic Good Trans Person she was (16)
  • Ezra telling you that abducting your child with autism and taking him across the country to Jimmy Kimmel is proof you love that child (6)
  • Last Ex Mas. If your fair weather “friends” want you to get back together with your abusive ex, don’t fight it. Your parents want you to move home so they’ll go along with it (5)

29: The “Texas-California Alliance” Award for the Worst Attempt at Political Commentary in a Piece of Fiction (Lilburne)

  • Civil War, the very namesake of this category (19)
  • The Girls on the Bus trying to make a Fox commentator sympathetic and Melissa Benoist’s character communing with the ghost of Hunter S. Thompson (11)
  • The (very on point and on brand, to be clear) reveal at the end of Fallout (6)
  • Arcane: League of Legends Season 2

30: The Letting Us, and Only Us Down Award for Most Obscure Disappointment (Owen)

  • Still no Anchisaurus toy from any of the major dinosaur toy manufacturers! (16)
  • BattleBots struggling to get an eighth season due to good ole’ Zaslav (9)
  • Plus-Size Elf (8)
  • QVC+ Original The Recipe Files. Too bland and competent to be a hoot, even with the very obvious product shilling and awkward QVC personality cameos (4)
  • Retconning the War Chief as an earlier version of the Master in Doctor Who: The War Games in Colour, something that went against multiple creative statements (3)
  • The USMNT crashing out on the Copa America group stage (3)

31: “No, the Children ARE Actually Wrong Sometimes” Award Dedicated to the Financial Failures of 2024 which Deserved Better (The Handsome Hound)

  • With a furious slamming of the fist, Furiosa (44)
  • Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, whose million-plus sales weren’t nearly enough to stop Ubisoft from sticking the team who made it on the very bloated development hells they made the game to escape (19)
  • The Fall Guy (19)
  • Transformers One (9)
  • Megalopolis (3)

32: Most Tragic Shutdown of a Company, Branch, Studio, or Institution (Merve)

  • Game Informer. The longest-running video game publication in America, instantly scrubbed entirely from existence without warning partway through producing an article (32)
  • Sesame Street (27)
  • The A’s in Oakland (17)
  • Tequila Works, the acclaimed Spanish indie developer behind Gylt, Rime, and especially the brilliant time-bending adventure game The Sexy Brutale. Then gaming giant Tencent bought a stake in them and roped them into the Riot Forge line of artsy narrative driven League of Legends spinoffs. Riot Forge closed at the start of this year due to none of the games turning a profit, over 600 people were fired. Tequila Works was set adrift to flounder for new support all year and ultimately died mere weeks ago (13)
  • Total Film magazine after a 27-year run (8)

33: Best Moment That’s Just Deeply Satisfying to the Primordial Lizard Part of Our Brains. As we did last year, we’ll provide all nominations as they are.

  • Paul rides the Sandworm for the first time, Dune Part 2
  • All you Gambit fans rejoice as Channing Tatum finally plays Reme, Deadpool & Wolverine. And all that after Logan wears the goofy, comics-accurate Wolverine mask
  • Hundreds of Beavers lives up its title
  • My Adventures with Superman gifts us the following episode synopsis: “Jimmy Olsen hires a bunch of gay supervillains to stage a heist. For bonus points, having its Suicide Squad take a planet-sized L months after that noxious Suicide Squad game dropped like a lead balloon.
  • Creature Commandos gives us “Cheers to the Tin Man!,” GI Robot’s finest hour, a montage of the Monster chasing the Bride across time and space set to a Gogol Bordello song that ends with them fighting at a 90s Gogol Bordello concert, and the final analysis over what is an Xbox.
  • The single most overpowered weapon in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom… is a bed.
  • Sonic the Hedgehog 3 gives all you Sonic Adventure 2 fans a masterful musical present for the ages.
  • Jon Voight says “wanna see my boner?” and then throws off his robe to reveal a crossbow that he shoots and kills two people with, Megalopolis. On top of all that, Adam Driver also talks to the audience, gets shot in the face by a pre-teen, and replaces half of his face with an element he invented and calls “megalon.” Apparently, there was even a high tech gladiatorial fight set to a song by Chloe Fineman from SNL.
  • Agatha All Along has a galaxy brain brilliant reveal for its “Teen” character.
  • The movie Trap got us happy to see a fucking M. Night Shyamalan movie and check out his lil nepo baby’s music. It’s even got an amazing piano whip!
  • Gambit has a one-on-one with the Tri-Sentinel, X-Men ’97
  • The remake of Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door turns two decades-old fan jokes into absurd, hilarious secret bosses. Bonus points for the Super Saiyan who’s only weak to perfect parries. Like Sekiro.
  • Shooting fireworks into a twister, Twisters
  • Two decades of Power Armor mythology go down the toilet as zombie cowboy Walton Goggins makes a Brother of Steel eat shit, multiple times, Fallout
  • The sheer, insane, comical level of excess in Vampire Survivors‘ Ode to Castlevania DLC, in which a proudly derivative Castlevania homage honors its inspiration by adding so much stuff that it’s mind-boggling. There are eighty characters, including forgettable D-listers and gloriously stupid alternate versions of characters. There are at least eight new whip attacks. Ninety-one pieces of music. Even in a medium that luxuriates in “more is more,” this is beyond the pale. But, like, in a good way.
  • Order of the Stick gives a best-ever splash page that makes “Lizard Brain” literal.
  • King Kong, with an Iron Man arm, teleports pink Godzilla to the Hollow Earth to do battle with evil Kong and a Godzilla that breathes ice, Godzilla X Kong
  • Asia Consent’s “Mother’s day” outfit, Dragula Season 6
  • Ray Nicholson channeling his dad’s creepy The Shining facial expressions, Smile 2
  • That 2024 led to this very award show highlighting something called Snow White and the Seven Samurai. More on that later.
  • Polaris + Knowhere + an Orichis space station = “-my Brood!,” The Fall of the House of X.
  • Mouthwashing gives us a… well, there’s a bit of a content warning in explaining this one.
  • Nottolot and its wacky end game genre changeup.
  • Sebastian Stan gets wrecked by a fake ceiling, A Different Man
  • Lesley Manville as a jungle shaman, Queer
  • Episode 6 of 100 Years of Solitude when Aureliano declares himself to be The Colonel Aureliano Buendia.
  • Every single fucking time Bill Skarsgård rolls his “R’s,” Nosferatu
  • And a big ole’ one for “the final season of Star Trek: Lower Decks”

However, although we watched it too late to really be included, the Peely Committee has to also present a Lifetime Achievement Award to Frankie Freako, a horror-comedy experience by the creators of Psycho Goreman. This truly demented film about alien hooligans takes its Gremlins, Ghoulies, and Full Moon Films inspirations and takes them in a frenetic, crazy direction. It is the definition of a movie going full Lizard Brain, and in the best way.

34: Worst Pre-2024 Pop Culture that You Experienced for the First Time This Year (Merve)

  • Fallout 4, which remains a low point in the plague of open world bloat (9)
  • Teen Titans Go! Vs. Teen Titans, a nasty, shallow, and shockingly self-conscious poison pill of a crossover. It extols every awful behavior of Teen Titans Go!, demeans and poorly represents the Teen Titans ‘03 TV show, and, worst of all, absolutely wastes “Weird” Al Yankovic as both Gentleman Ghost and Darkseid (7)
  • Natural Born Killers, a movie that should have been a slam dunk in 1994—the year of OJ, a surge in society’s fascination with serial killers—had it not been, you know, an Oliver Stone movie (6)
  • Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard, a meta 2009 third-person shooter starring Will Arnett as a down on his luck video game mascot. Its comedy comes almost entirely through tired references, lazy puns, and constant lampshading, so you get the one-two punch of bad gameplay and jokes where Matt Hazard complains about how bad it is (6)
  • Detroit Become Human, and we at the Peely Committee will never pass up an opportunity to kick David Cage when he’s down. (5)
  • Christmas With Love, a lesbian pseudo-Hallmark comedy about a struggling actress appearing in an unlicensed Friends musical (5)

35: Silliest Title for an Eric Roberts Movie Released in 2024

  • A Joint Custody Christmas (23)
  • Snow White and the Seven Samurai. Told you were were getting to it (15)
  • My Redneck Neighbor: Chapter 1 – The Rednecks Are Coming (14)
  • Rice Girl: My Redneck Neighbor 2 (9)
  • The Brattt. Yes, that’s right: three t’s. (6)

36: Worst Video Game of 2024

  • All these AI hentai shovelware titles hitting the Switch eShop (23)
  • Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League (18)
  • Funko Fusion (8)
  • Unpacking Deluxe Edition—a game not in any way related to the award winning cozy game Unpacking, which has no “deluxe edition.” This is pure unregulated Switch eShop shovelware, like last year’s Last Hope (7)
  • Clunky multiplayer hack n slash South Park: Snow Day (6) 

37: Worst Song or Album of 2024

  • “Facts” by Tom McDonald and Ben Shapiro. Yes, Ben Shapiro rapped this year (25)
  • Beyoncé’s cover of “Jolene,” with its notable lyrical and tonal changes (22)
  • T-Pain and Mark Zuckerberg, “Get Low” (12)
  • Drake, “Push Ups” (11)
  • Drake, “Heart Part 6” (9)
  • Katy Perry, “143” (9)

38: Worst Television Season or Miniseries of 2024

  • Universal Basic Guys (19)
  • Knuckles (10)
  • The Umbrella Academy Season 4 (11)
  • The Bear Season 3 (10)
  • Rykter Season 3 (3)
  • High Potential (3)

39: Worst Book, Comic, Novella, or Extended Piece of Prose of 2024

  • The ending of X-Men’s “Krakoa Age” (17)
  • Star Wars: Battle for Jakku (4)
  • Spider-Man Reign 2 (3)
  • Dark Spaces: Dungeon (2)
  • Absolute Batman (1)

40: Worst Film of 2024

  • Matt Walsh’s Am I Racist (30)
  • Deadpool & Wolverine (26)
  • Borderlands (23)
  • Madame Web (20)
  • Reagan (18)
  • Joker 2: Folie à Deux (17)
  • Mean Girls (2024) (16)
  • Megalopolis (13)
  • Emilia Perez (12)
  • Mufasa (12)

…And that’s the end of that! I’d like to thank my co-host Lily Bones for help in writing, editing, organizing, and vote tallying, and LibraryLass who makes these excellent announcement headers. Until next time, see ya!