South Africa has always had a soft spot for the oddball hits everyone else loves to hate. Leon Schuster’s slapstick comedies are box office gold in South Africa. Anaconda reruns on eTV’s Friday night slot? Practically a tradition. Now, South Africans have added a new guilty pleasure to the list: Ice Cube’s alien-invasion thriller War of the Worlds. Yes, the one critics had buried six feet deep with a 0% Rotten Tomatoes score.
Released on Prime Video on July 30, Rich Lee’s War of the Worlds stars Ice Cube as Homeland Security cyber-security analyst Will Radford, teaming up with NASA scientist Dr. Sandra Salas (Eva Longoria) to lead survivors through an alien apocalypse. Clark Gregg from Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Andrea Savage from I’m Sorry, and young talents like Henry Hunter Hall and Iman Benson fill out the cast. On paper, it sounds promising. In reality, well…
Barbara Friedman, speaking to CapeTalk’s Clarence Ford, summed it up bluntly: “It’s so badly done and put together.” She also couldn’t resist sharing one of the funniest online reactions: “Not Ice Cube fighting aliens on Zoom!” And honestly, that’s not far off—Cube spends most of the film planted behind a desk.
Critics everywhere have had a field day. Out of 27 reviews, all but one torched the movie, some even calling it the worst film of 2025 so far. The lone positive review came from Entertainment Weekly’s Jordan Hoffman, who admitted it’s flawed but argued that its sheer silliness can be oddly entertaining. That single vote of confidence bumped the movie’s RT score to a whopping 4%, with audiences sitting at a marginally better 21% from over 1,000 ratings. IMDB hasn’t been kinder either, giving it a 3.2.
So how does a global flop end up topping charts in South Africa? According to Friedman, “It’s number one in Mzansi.” While Eddie Murphy’s The Pickup currently leads Prime Video’s global rankings, War of the Worlds is sitting pretty in the local Top 10.
Maybe South Africans are drawn to the underdog status. Maybe wee just enjoy watching the rest of the world collectively groan while we hit “Play” again. Or maybe it’s the same reason Anaconda keeps reeling us back in: Sometimes bad movies are just more fun. And if a film like War of the Worlds can go viral because people can’t stop mocking it, isn’t that still a kind of success?
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