7 Worst Movie Soundtracks of All Time, Ranked

Soundtracks are different. If you want great soundtracks, and soundtracks that really suit the movie they belong to, then the likes of Trainspotting and Pulp Fiction have got your back, and if you want a great score and a great soundtrack at the same time, 1983’s Scarface does a bit of both. Anyway, good soundtracks aren’t the focus of the ranking below. These soundtracks contain bad music, or misused music that’s usually good when divorced from the context of the movie. It was a bit hard to find only soundtracks compiled of bad songs, so soundtracks with inappropriate or cynically thrown-in songs are also included below, and will be specified accordingly.

7 'Godzilla' (1998)

This is an easy and kind of petty pick. Maybe it’s not the best idea to start with something petty, but whatever. Godzilla (1998) sucks, and any opportunity to talk about Godzilla (1998) sucking must be seized. What a wonderful series Godzilla is, or at least can be, and what a thoroughly awe-inspiring misunderstanding of it is Godzilla (1998). It’s mind-bending how bad it is.

Because of the mind-bending awfulness, the soundtrack is just one small layer in what’s an overall terrible-looking and tasting cake, but, again, any opportunity to be a hater must be embraced. You get a disappointing cover of the usually incredible “Heroes” (the David Bowie song), a misused Rage Against the Machine track, and then the foul-smelling icing on the whole terrible cake: a P. Diddy song called “Come with Me.” It is, regrettably, true. It is a sentence that hurts to type, and a fact that feels so wrong, but it’s here, and it’s a part of the whole awful soundtrack. Like anyone ever needed another reason to stay the hell away from 1998’s Godzilla.

6 'The Room' (2003)

If you want to try and single out the almost redeeming elements found in The Room, you could highlight the honestly (and weirdly) iconic score by Mladen Milicevic. If it’s not good in the traditional sense, then it’s ultimately solid and memorable in a way that the rest of the movie kind of falls short of being, at least intentionally. Like, the score is better than the writing, directing, acting, and the everything else-ing.

But on top of the instrumental score, you’ve also got some songs featured in The Room, most of them underscoring the infamous (and needlessly long) sex scenes, with those songs honestly adding to the unintentional comedy and/or discomfort of such scenes. So, they're necessary to The Room being the wonderful disaster that it is, but they're also fairly bad songs… and even if you hear them out of context, somehow, you're likely to be reminded of the scenes they back, which probably isn't something you want to remember.

5 'Thor: Love and Thunder' (2022)

There are problems beyond just the music in Thor: Love and Thunder, and some of them have even been acknowledged by those involved with its production. Maybe in an attempt to distract from the generally ugly visuals, Guns N' Roses needle drops were prominent throughout, a little too aggressively, with "Sweet Child o' Mine," "Welcome to the Jungle", "Paradise City", and "November Rain" all heard here.

It’s a little in line with Thor: Ragnarok prominently featuring Led Zeppelin’s "Immigrant Song," yet that song worked in that context, musically and lyrically. The insistence on having Guns N’ Roses song after Guns N’ Roses song feels hollow and desperate, in this overall hollow and desperate superhero film. Those Guns N’ Roses songs are all good, too, being easily among the band’s best, but they just don’t really fit or feel earned here, and the rest of the movie drags them down, making them sound honestly quite bad, in this context. Or in this lack of context. What a mess of a movie.

4 'Sky High' (2005)

Some people really love Sky High, be it for nostalgic reasons or otherwise, so saying anything negative about it always feels risky. In this instance, it’s just the music that’s going to be critiqued. Other examples in this ranking have misused music that’s used to back bad movies, but with Sky High, you get an honestly decent family-friendly superhero movie that’s ultimately brought down by the music it uses.

Well, actually, the songs here are good, but it’s the fact that they're all lackluster covers that hurts things. Seems like it’s cheaper to license covers of existing songs, so that was done for Sky High, and so if you're a fan of bands like Talking Heads, The Smiths, The Cars, Tears for Fears, and Devo, among others, then you get to hear inferior versions of some of their songs! Yay! (Again, it’s a family movie, so kids probably won’t care or notice, unless they're kids who really like new wave stuff from the ‘80s for whatever reason).

3 'Suicide Squad' (2016)

Like with Thor: Love and Thunder, this is an instance of good music being misused, and perhaps even the definitive example of good music being misused: 2016’s Suicide Squad. If you just listen to the music, you'll get some admittedly good music, since you will technically hear the likes of Creedence Clearwater Revival, The Rolling Stones, Black Sabbath, Kanye West, The White Stripes, and Queen here.

That’s really only scratching the surface, and therein more or less lies the problem: Suicide Squad just keeps throwing so many iconic songs from iconic artists at you, and it gets exhausting. They feel cynically inserted to distract from the sheer messiness of the overall movie, and so yeah, the music’s generally not bad, but it is all utilized badly, if that makes sense. It feels like a desperate attempt to recapture the lightning-in-a-bottle nature of the first Guardians of the Galaxy movie, without really understanding how that soundtrack, though stacked with great/iconic songs, was also rather carefully assembled, so that the songs used actually meant something within the film itself.

2 'Lost Horizon' (1973)

1937’s Lost Horizon is a pretty great fantasy movie, especially for its time, but 1973’s Lost Horizon might well be a somewhat more engaging watch, even though it’s technically a far inferior movie. In both cases, the narrative concerns the discovery of a mythical and seemingly utopian land known as Shangri-La, with the 1937 film being a non-musical, and the 1973 version being a very shoddy musical.

With the 1973 film, it’s a more or less watchable – if slightly underwhelming – fantasy film until the scenes when people break out into song, when it becomes unintentionally hilarious. Maybe the songs here don’t sound so bad out of context, but in context, they are ludicrously cheesy, stilted, and just off… it’s hard to know who to blame, though. It is just the case that the songs don’t work, and the musical numbers are incredibly silly, so the soundtrack does end up ultimately feeling, in one way or another, pretty bad.

1 'Cocktail' (1988)

If you don’t venture too far into the past, it’s hard to find many genuinely bad Tom Cruise movies (okay, aside from The Mummy, if anyone remembers that). But in the 1980s, he was in a few genuine stinkers, and Cocktail is one of them. This is a complete nothing of a movie that people seem to kind of like because of the vibes? Maybe? It’s very ‘80s, for what that’s worth, but 1986’s Top Gun is a better “vibes only” Cruise movie from around the same time (as in, that one’s also flawed in some ways, but it’s still watchable).

Cocktail contains one shoddy song after another, and it’s not the main issue of the movie, yet the soundtrack here does not help, by any means. "Don't Worry, Be Happy" and perhaps the worst Beach Boys song, "Kokomo," are here, for starters, and then there’s some other really limp and uninteresting song choices throughout. There was good music that came out in the 1980s, but you wouldn’t know it, from listening to the Cocktail soundtrack.