__Well, the year 2020 is about to end, and I'm sure none of us are sorry to see it go! I don't think anyone would deny this has been one of the worst years in recent memory. To perfectly sum it up, all you need is two words: "social distancing". Anyone who was trying to predict the future and what great developments would unfold in the first year of a new decade, there's no way they could have foreseen a highly contagious virus that would almost cripple society altogether! Personally, I'm thankful that neither I nor anyone I know has contracted the virus, but obviously a lot of people weren't so lucky.
__We were all affected in other ways, though. A lot of public places were forced to close, including cinemas. As a result, my movie-watching experience this year was an especially lame one. Not in the sense that there were tons of bad movies, like in some previous years. I said last year that I was retiring my worst-of-the-year list and therefore giving up on actively seeking out bad movies, and I meant it. So an overabundance of bad movies wasn't the problem. It's more that my schedule was starved of anything super exciting. In the absence of any big tentpole releases in cinemas, my main source of information this year was the films page on Letterboxd, which is sorted by popularity by default. That's how I kept track of what were the year's biggest hits, as it were. I didn't see nearly as many movies as in previous years, but on the plus side, there weren't too many stinkers among the ones I did see. I still saw enough that I disliked for a top five of the year's worst, but I stand by what I said before: I'm not going to make that list. I'll still spotlight the most disappointing movie, but before that, let me go over my usual reminder of my year-end list's criteria, my definition of what movies qualify for a particular year.
__The movie simply has to have been released for public consumption by the end of the year – which, in this case, usually meant streaming. So anything that's only been seen at a film festival so far doesn't count. Neither does a movie that was released in another country in a previous year. After all, most of what I saw at the cinema in those first two months was 2019 movies that were only just making it to the British Isles, including The Lighthouse, Jojo Rabbit and Parasite.
__Before I list my ten favourite examples of movies that fit that bill for 2020, let's talk about the single most disappointing one.
