The sad truth about 'overrated' Meryl Streep: Why critics are turning on Oscar-winning icon over 'Streepslop' movies

There's no doubt that Meryl Streep is one of the greatest performers to ever grace the big screen.

Since snagging her first Academy Award nomination in 1978's The Deer Hunter, Streep has both entertained the masses and dazzled critics for decades.

In fact, she currently has the No. 1 movie at the box office with The Devil Wears Prada 2, which has already grossed over $400million in less than two weeks.

But now, recent roles chosen by the 76-year-old icon have come under scrutiny on social media, after she was named as the top actor of this century in a post going viral on X. 

While the list was later revealed to be created by AI, it sparked serious debate, with viewers and critics questioning some of her choices over the past two-and-a-half decades. 

'I'll give you three chances to name a good Meryl Streep movie since 2000 and I'll be shocked if you can get to two,' one user wrote in a now-viral post on X. 

Political journalist David Weigel agreed with the sentiment, going as far as to dub the three-time Oscar winner's less lauded films 'Streepslop'.

Weigel then rattled off a handful of Streep's stinkers, including the critically-panned Lions for Lambs, which has a paltry 'fresh' rating of just 28% on review aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes. 

Then there's the disastrous musical comedy The Prom, which was supposed to recreate the success of Streep's Mamma Mia! films. 

Directed by Ryan Murphy and co-starring Nicole Kidman and James Corden, The Prom tanked in theatres and failed to impress critics.

The Prom isn't the only musical misstep from Streep, with the actress also appearing in Diablo Cody's forgettable Ricki and the Flash.

In the comedy-drama, Streep plays a washed-up rock star who tries to reconnect with her estranged daughter, who is played by her real-life daughter Mamie Gummer.

Streep and Gummer had previously worked together on 2007's glacially-slow drama Evening, which the New York Times said was filled with 'labored dialogue' in a negative review. 

Other Streep-led rom-coms that garnered bad reviews include 2005's Prime with Uma Thurman and 2009's It's Complicated with Alec Baldwin - although the latter defied naysayers and grossed $220 million at the box office. 

Streep bombed again in Steven Soderbergh comedy-drama The Laundromat, which, despite an award-winning cast that included Gary Oldman, Sharon Stone, and Antonio Banderas, was savaged by critics.

She also starred alongside pop icon Taylor Swift in 2014's dystopian drama The Giver, which has an embarrassingly low rating of just 34% on Rotten Tomatoes.

Her other flops include Rendition with Reese Witherspoon and the 2007 drama Dark Matter.

Even some of Streep's Oscar-nominated films are far from classics.

Her politically-charged comedy Don't Look Up earned a Best Picture nomination in 2021 and broke streaming records on Netflix during the Covid pandemic, but it polarized critics and audiences alike.

In one scathing review from The Hollywood Reporter, David Rooney called it 'an insufferably smug satire stuffed to the gills with stars that purports to comment on political and media inattention to the climate crisis but really just trivializes it.'

And while 2011's The Iron Lady earned Streep her last Best Actress Oscar thanks to her turn as British politician Margaret Thatcher, the film itself has just 51% on Rotten Tomatoes.

'Meryl Streep's performance as The Iron Lady is reliably perfect, but it's mired in bland, self-important storytelling,' reads the site's consensus. 

While Streep has long been hailed as the premier performer of her generation, some critics have started to turn on the thespian – especially when it comes to her recent work.

In 2020, she was controversially left out of the New York Times' list of the Greatest Actors of the 21st Century.

The list featured French icons like Isabelle Huppert and Catherine Deneuve, risk taker Nicole Kidman, Hollywood heavyweights Denzel Washington and Keanu Reeves, and Oscar darling Daniel Day-Lewis, but no Streep. 

Her omission sparked widespread backlash and The Times' chief film critics Manohla Dargis and AO Scott were forced to defend their decision in a follow-up piece.

'Meryl Streep has given some very fine performances in the past 20 years, but she's also given some not very good ones that are showy and overdone,' said Scott.

'I'm thinking of her portrayal of Violet Weston in August: Osage County or even as Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady, which she won an Oscar for in 2012. Those didn't knock her out of contention, but they show she has more of a mixed record than her fans might acknowledge.'

Dargis added, 'People keep yelling at us about how many Oscar nominations Streep has, as if that's a metric Tony and I ever paid attention to.

'This is not a list of people who have been nominated for Oscars; this is our list of people we really, really respect and love.'

Despite the growing criticism towards Streep's oeuvre, it's worth noting that the most nominated actress in Oscars history has still appeared in a number of modern day classics.

Charlie Kaufman's Adaptation, starring Streep and Nicolas Cage, was ranked by both the New York Times and the British Film Institute as one of the greatest films of the 21st century.

She followed Adaptation with The Hours, which was recently selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress.

Streep was heralded with back-to-back Oscar nominations for Doubt and Julie & Julia in the late 2000s, around the same time that she dominated the box office in Mamma Mia!.

She later wowed mainstream critics in Steven Spielberg's The Post, which detailed the true story of intrepid journalists as they fought to publish the Pentagon Papers.

Streep is now riding high with one of the most commercially successful films of her five-decade career, The Devil Wears Prada 2.

The sequel to the 2006 chick flick has already grossed $433million from its $100million budget, and is expected to hit over $700million by the end of its theatrical run.

Her salary for the sequel earned her $12.5million upfront, but according to Variety, Streep will most likely walk away with another $20million on top because she negotiated for box office bonuses.

With millions in the bank and a formidable filmography, Streep, now 76, could easily kick back and relax, but she's far from done carving out her place in Hollywood's history books.

She's currently set to play Joni Mitchell in Cameron Crowe's upcoming biopic on the singer-songwriter, which already sounds like it's poised for Oscar glory.

On top of that, she's teaming up with Sigourney Weaver for the thriller Useful Idiots and has a voice role in Greta Gerwig's big budget reboot of The Chronicles of Narnia franchise on Netflix.

As for Streep's own thoughts on her status as either Tinseltown's most talented actor or most overrated, she seems rather unbothered by it.

'I don't think of myself as the greatest anything—cook, housekeeper, actor or developer of material. I don't think there's the best of anything,' she said in 2010.