‘Hate-watching’ — is it a thing?

Never. I'm at a point where I know if I'll like a movie soon, and if I don't and still feel like it, there's plenty of other movies on YouTube or my DVR to choose from.

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Well, I’ve seen it and I think it’s perfectly fine.

Atta girl!

I haven't written it up yet, but I really enjoyed the Barbie movie specifically as a movie to see in the theater. The sets! The colors! The costumes! In many moments it almost gave me big-budget old Hollywood musical vibes and I loved that element of it.

Back on topic: I have long had a hard time stopping things (movies, books, TV series) in the middle, which has resulted in me watching movies I did not enjoy, feeling resentful for most of it. I'd say that 95% of my "hate-watch" experiences come from this. I'm looking at you, 1990s version of Carnival of Souls!!

I'm currently hate-watching the final episode of Amazing Race, season 32 mostly because I don't really care about any of the remaining teams, but I do wanna know who wins

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Watching terrible people win reality shows definitely gets you into hate-watch territory. There was one season of Amazing Race (a really early season, maybe the third?) where watching the one team win was just awful.

Yeah, there's been a fair share of wins that have gotten "eye rolls" for me, but usually, I can find a couple of teams I like to latch on until the finale. This season, I had nothing No, but to be honest, it wasn't like the teams were awful. I just didn't care about the three teams or how they chose to play the game.

Gotcha.

Sometimes I'm like, "Ugh. These seem like genuinely terrible people. I'm about to watch terrible people win $250,000."

...or a million dollars!

Barbie was a shallow product movie that pretentiously acted like it was something deeper than that.

Anyway, I rarely sit down to watch a movie I know I will hate. There have been times I've come close to, but then I find that I just can't do it. Why would I want to witness the war crimes of The Emoji Movie when there are so many gems I can catch up with instead?

When it comes to TV however, I am somehow more drawn to checking out why something's a failure. It has to be really infamous though, not just an unremarkable mediocrity that left people in a state of boredom. For example I sat through the entirety of The Prince, and despite each episode only being 15 minutes long it was one of the most torturous experiences of my life. But I was fascinated by such a weird show even existing and so I had to check it out. So I guess that could count as "hate-watching" in a sense.

You couldn't even pay me to watch reality shows of people acting like entitled whiny dickheads though. Pretty much the worst thing on earth.

I do. But only because I feel guilty if I turn a film off....because you should really watch the whole film before you write criticism about it.

The worst film reviews by amateurs are those that say things like "2 out of 10, turned it off after 15 minutes, way too slow". Like you watched 20% of the film, give it more of a chance.

Recent examples of films I watched all the way through and hated include:

Top Gun 2
Hacksaw Ridge
Baby Driver

I should have turned them off and used my time better. But I just felt guilty.

I feel it's definitely a thing, but what I can't work out is if it's always been a thing and millennials have given it a name or it's something new? It feels new to me (certainly I can't bring to mind anyone watching something they knew they hated (not thought they'd hate) and I wonder if it's to do with the ease of access and availability of content or something more philosophical which speaks of our current times? In the same way that there's fun in watching a bad film and ripping it apart with your friends, maybe we now get more pleasure from being angry about something that doesn't matter? Is it to do with a lack of outlets for our anger and frustrations? A reflection acknowledging how powerless we are/feel today? I could probably reel off a few more hypothesises which have passed through my mind when wondering about why this is a thing because, as a feeling, I don't get it.

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5-time MoFo Award winner.

Yeah, no worries, just parsing it out in case it's useful.

This is definitely a thing, giving a very old concept a new name and thinking this act of rebranding is actually an invention.

Millions of Americans watched Monday Night Football because they hated Howard Cosell.


Back when a sizable portion of our population thought pro wrestling as real, they would pay to see the bad guy get thrashed. These guys were masters at pissing off people to the point of spending.


Who can forget the guy in the baseball dunking tank?! Many people just watch the act as he taunts the crowd.


Tbph a former president might have gotten a sizable amount of fencepole votes just for being outrageous, and infuriating so many people to where they knew he wouldnt be boring.


Even boring, awfully made films got a breath of life with Mystery Science Theatre 3000s formula. A formula we all have used at times..... Yeah that's all I got.

The ONLY time I'll watch something that I truly hate is if it's required like in a HoF. Yes, I've watched plenty of dumb-ass movies in my time that were so bad that they were mildly entertaining. But there's no way I'm wasting part of my life watching a movie that I hate. All I need is 15 minutes and if it sucks in the first 15 then 95% chance it won't get any better...and I have much better things to do, like putting on a different movie and enjoying that.

I've only understood hate watching as the act of trying to be a spectator to lifestyles or politics or artistic philosophies that generate anger in a person. Something to generate rage. And I guess what some people don't seem to get about this (thankfully, because hate watching is a horrific thing and the cause of most of our troubles these days) is that anger is a stimulant and people can in fact become addicted to it. It's one of the main reason all media is beginning to fail is, in that in leans into this, because it entraps viewers. It's a vile vile thing that people need to be extremely wary about. I know from experience as I've fallen into that trap at times and it is all bad news.


The person who mentioned wrestling is on point as that is probably the genesis of hate watching. Frequently heels were popular draws because they represented people we were conditioned to hate. Russians, Arabs, arrogant braggarts, rich people, homosexuals. So even though something like wrestling isn't a specifically deep spectacle, it absolutely aims at exciting our deeply rooted biases and prejudices.


As for just watching a bad movie, I've never understood that to be hate watching, although it's also possible the definition has changed over the years. And in regards to this, I'm all for this kind of hate watching, because it is what is pretty much necessary to expand ones vocabulary of what cinema is. Just because we hate something that we are watching, in no way means it is bad. It very well couls just be something unfamiliar to us. Something on a different wavelength. And the only way to determine this and potentially allow our initial hate of it to turn into an understanding of something that was simply different, is to return and give it another chance. Otherwise, films only gratify the same itches over and over again, and we limit the chance we will start to grasp other worldviews. So doing this is hardly a waste of time if one loves the idea of film, and not simply being entertained by a film.


From my perspective, saying one is a film lover who then refuses to watch what doesn't quickly appeal to them, is the equivalent of saying youre a fitness lover, who just doesn't like the exercises that make you tired or your muscles hurt. It actually doesn't make a lot of sense, and is probably why I find so many conversations about the art of film so unbelievably dreary.


Like, I get why people don't want to return to things they didn't like. It makes sense on a basic level but....um....ya...let's just say I think it's unfortunate so many people have such a reactionary and visceral response to something that doesn't immediately 'grab them'.

"Hate watching" seems like a waste of brain cells and time in this mortal body. Of course, you need to define "Hate". For me that would mean something that makes me angry or offended. I have no use for that.

On the other hand, sometimes, mainly late at night, I enjoy watching trashy horror, monster or noir movies, having some beer, futzing around on social media. They usually are not good movies, but I don't hate them, in fact, I enjoy them for that combination of alcohol, bad movie and social media, which removes me from some of the realities of life.

I used to hate some of the stuff I watched back when watching a certain show was a way to have something to contribute at lunch or around the watercooler.

I have a difficult time watching things involving philosophies and behaviors I can't get behind, even if those philosophies are demonized. You can imagine how hard 12 Years a Slave was for me. On the slavery subject, I can pretty much only get through Moses movies because I had a VHS copy of The Great Adventure with Moses on it as a baby, and later The Prince of Egypt as a kid. I'll even give Exodus: Gods and Kings points for tackling the morality of it from varying perspectives, and as weird as that subplot involving the kid playing the Angel of God was, he made a few key [points rarely mentioned in other Moses adaptations (and the kind did a INCREDIBLE job playing him. Best performance in the movie. Like, I literally thought he was actually playing GOD for a moment).