Science Fiction was not the most used genre for 2020. Maybe because the world itself was living out a sci-fi story. Still, there are some choices for Best and Worst Sci-Fi.

One rule I have followed. I do not include superhero movies in this award. That would be less of a constrictive rule this year with the limited number of superhero flicks that came out, but it does mean that there will be no Wonder Woman 1984 or Old Guard on these lists.

Best Sci-Fi Movie

Previous Winners:  Upgrade, Blade Runner 2049, Arrival, The Martian, Ex Machina, Star Trek Into Darkness, Edge of Tomorrow, Freaks

Runners-Up for Best: Spontaneous, Freaky, Bill & Ted Face the Music, Vivarium, The Vast of Night, Color Out of Space

Winner:

The Invisible Man

The Invisible Man finished high up on the horror list as well, this time taking the gold for sci-fi. The Invisible Man starred Elisabeth Moss as a woman tormented by her old boyfriend who had supposedly died. Instead, he found a way to turn himself invisible.

The movie was one of the breakout hits of the year in the few months that films were released in the theaters worldwide. It had a very modest $7 million dollar budget and made that back in a massive amount. It was tense and anxious and still stands out as one of the top films of 2020.

Worst Sci-Fi Film

Runners-Up: Underwater, Dolittle, Bloodshot, Tenet, The Midnight Sky.

Both Tenet and The Midnight Sky were okay. They are certainly much better than the other films on this list. Bloodshot is a comic book movie, but I am not considering him a superhero. The character does feel more sci-fi than superheroic and Vin Diesel brings his same old act to this. Dolittle was not the massive success that Robert Downey Jr. had hoped. It was a dragon fart of a movie. Underwater was one that I barely remembered seeing in the theater in January.

Winner:

Artemis Fowl.

This was released by Disney straight to Disney + midway through the year. Based on a young adult book, the movie brought a level of stupidity that had not been seen in quite a while. It was truly disappointing since the potential premise of the young thief Artemis Fowl had some merit. However, the execution of this film was just not there. And poor, poor Judi Dench, who went from Cats to this atrocity.

A brand new category for 2020! Probably should have been one several years ago. There certainly is not any end in sight for comic book movies, no matter what the pundits may say about “comic book movie fatigue.” 2021 will truly test that theory as there will be a ton of new comic book movies coming out.

Meanwhile, 2020 was the least amount of comic book movies to come out in a decade.

In order to celebrate the new award, named after the iconic and EYG Hall of Famer Christopher Reeve, I went back in time and chose a winner for ever year back until 1989. I stopped at 1989 because 1988 was the first year that did not have anything in place even remotely worth honoring.

Doing it this way, there were a couple of CBMs that might not have made a list of great movies from the genre, but since it was the best of the year, they made the list.

Some of these will be easy to predict. Starting off:

1989 Batman

1990 Dick Tracy (I debated between Dick Tracy and Darkman for this year)

1991 The Rocketeer

1992 Batman Returns

1993 Batman: Mask of the Phantasm

1994 The Crow

1995 Batman Forever

1996 The Phantom

1997 Men in Black

1998 Blade

1999 Mystery Men

2000 X-Men

2001 From Hell

2002 Spider-Man

2003 X2: X-Men United

2004 Spider-Man 2

2005 V for Vendetta

2006 300

2007 Superman: Doomsday

2008 The Dark Knight (honorable mention to Iron Man)

2009 Watchmen

2010 Scott Pilgrim vs. the World

2011 Captain America: First Avenger

2012 The Avengers

2013 Iron Man 3

2014 (Tie) Captain America: Winter Soldier & Guardians of the Galaxy

2015 Avengers: Age of Ultron

2016 Captain America: Civil War

2017 Logan

2018 Avengers: Infinity War

2019 Avengers: Endgame

Runners-Up for 2020: Old Guard, Wonder Woman 1984, The New Mutants, Justice League Dark: Apokolips War, Superman: Red Son

2020: Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn)

Though most of the CBM of 2020 are on their way to 2021, Birds of Prey was a solid early year entry with Margot Robbie reprising her role as Harley Quinn (from Suicide Squad). The supporting cast around Robbie was strong as well with some of the lesser known DC heroines (at least to the public at large) in place.

Horror has been one of the most popular genres over the last decade. There has been a resurgence in the realm of horror and, with the arrival of such horror specific streaming services as Shudder, horror has become very prevalent.

There are a few horror movies that could also appear on a sci-fi list coming up.

We will start with the Worst!

Runners-Up: There are a lot of these. When horror goes bad, it gets really bad. Gretel & Hansel was a horrid film while we were still in theaters. Blumhouse’s Fantasy Island was a huge disappointment. The unneeded sequels Brahms: The Boy II and Babysitter: Killer Queen were bad. I had liked the Babysitter on Netflix and that sequel was quite disappointing. The Rental and The Lodge were not good. Come Play, Nocturne and The Lie varied for the badness. Evil Eye was another on Amazon Prime that did not reach the level expected. Antebellum wasted an intriguing premise thanks to the trailer. Into the Dark: Delivered was terrible too.

Worst Horror Movie of 2020

The Grudge

The Grudge was the first movie I saw in 2020 and it was never equaled in badness among horror movies. The movie had a great cast but it was such a dull film and horrible film.

Best Horror Movies

Runners-Up: I really enjoyed the online Host film. It was short, but it may have been the most intense of the films. Pooka Lives! is one of my personal favorites for the year on Hulu. The Invisible Man was one of the best films early this year and was break out for Elisabeth Moss. The Netflix film His House was one of the best of the year, with one of the deeper story. Alone was an interesting thriller that started on the highway. The Hunt was another early year controversial film with a break out performance by Betty Gilpin. Z was a streaming film that caught me off guard.

Best Horror Film of the Year:

Black Box

Black Box was a surprise. It appeared on Amazon Prime during the Halloween and it caught me off guard with how great this film was. It had Phylicia Rashaad appearing and there were some real frightening images. There was a real twist in the film and I loved it.

This is another award that I pushed back to wait for Soul to come out just in case. There is a runner-up from that film.

Now remember, a voice over may not necessarily just be an animated film. This includes live action with motion capture or an animation/live action combination.

Previous Winners:  Auli’i Cravalho (Moana), Andy Serkis (Dawn of the Planet of the Apes), Robin Williams (Aladdin- honorary), Josh Brolin (Avengers: Infinity War), Ryan Reynolds (Detective Pikachu)

Runners-Up: I already mentioned that Soul had one so I will place Jamie Foxx here to kick it off. He was excellent in the role. Matt Ryan voicing John Constantine in Justice League Dark. Matt Ryan is one of the most popular version of Constantine. Tom Holland‘s voice work in Onward is great. He has done a couple of animated movies now over the last few years. Sean Bean‘s Wolfwalkers was the animated film of the year, but his work was some of the best. Ben Schwartz was Sonic the Hedgehog and the voice was great.

2020 Winner is…

Pedro Pascal (The Mandalorian)

A perfect example of a voice over that is not animated. Pedro Pascal is mostly not in the armor during filming but we always here his voice. This season of The Mandalorian has been top notch and Pascal showed remarkable character growth as his connection grew with Grogu.

I have waited specifically for today before compiling this final list because of one specific film dropping on Disney + today. I anticipated that film making this list so I wanted to wait. Did it make it? If you read the review, you can probably guess.

Anyway… here we go.

Oh, previous winners first…

Previous Winners: Spider-Man: Into the Spider-verse, Coco, Moana, Inside Out, Big Hero 6, Flashpoint Paradox, Paranorman, Winnie the Pooh, Klaus

#10. Superman: Red Son. Superman crashes in Soviet Russia and becomes an agent of the USSR. How does that change the world?

#9. Trolls: World Tour. A sequel to a surprise hit that became the first major film to head to streaming as a release this past summer.

#8. The Croods: A New Age. An animated movie that goes absolutely bat shot crazy in the second half. And I respected that.

#7. Scoob! This was fine, but it could have been so much more. I want more of the story to focus in on Scooby-Doo, Shaggy and the gang and less on Blue Falcon and other Hanna Barbera characters.

#6. Justice League Dark: Apokolips War. The “infinity war” of the DC animation series. Apokolips is a major DC powerhouse villain (who inspired Marvel to create Thanos) and he has devastated the heroes. They try to come back.

#5. Over the Moon. The Netflix film featuring a young girl who builds a space ship to travel to the moon and find a goddess. It was great animation and a underappreciated film.

#4. Onward. A Pixar film that was able to be released in theaters early in the year. Chris Pratt and Tom Holland voice brothers who go on a trip to try and figure out how to use a magical staff to bring their father back to life for a short period. Emotional as any Pixar films can be.

#3. The Willoughbys. Another Netflix animated film from this year. A family of four kids try and get away from their abusive parents and they head out on adventures with their new nanny.

#2. Soul. Pixar’s second film that was released today on Disney +. Jamie Foxx was tremendous as a middle school band teacher who is desperate to play a gig with a quartet. Unfortunately, he dies before he can. He does not want to allow that to stop him.

#1. Wolfwalkers. The Apple Plus film which gives us a look at a fantasy story dealing with the men of a town trying to kill the wolves in the forest who are preventing them from expanding. This is such a great film and the animation is exceptionally original.

This was a brand new award last year, in honor of Avengers: Endgame. I can still remember the emotions and feelings I had when seeing this movie and its tremendous cast. This year had several movies that contained remarkable actors.

I consider an ensemble in a movie to be a group of actors from a movie where there was lacking an obvious lead performance.

The Avengers: Endgame Ensemble Cast of the Year Award

Previous Winners:  Avengers: Endgame

We shall start with the runners-up.

Runners-Up:

The Personal History of David Copperfield. I included this because the cast was so great, but it did not receive the award because the fact that Dev Patel was truly the lead actor and the rest of the actors were supporting to him.

The Birds of Prey. Another ensemble that is actually headed up by Margot Robbie. She was more of the lead actor in the film than the whole film was ensemble.

Da 5 Bloods. The exceptional Netflix movie from Spike Lee was a leading candidate for this award. Once again, though, I thought there was one major standout in the cast, that being Delroy Lindo.

Hamilton. The Disney + filmed version of the stage play was a real treat during the summer of 2020. Disney + placed it on their streaming service instead of a theatrical release in 2021. The musical was brilliant.

Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. This was probably the second place film in this category. Viola Davis was unbelievably brilliant and Chadwick Boseman’s final filmed performance was his best work ever (and that was saying something).

And the winner is…

The Trial of the Chicago 7

The fantastic Netflix biopic telling the story of the trial of the Chicago 7 was a true ensemble cast. Eddie Redmayne, Alex Sharp, Sacha Baron Cohen, Jeremy Strong, Mark Rylance, Frank Langella, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Michael Keaton, John Carroll Lynch, Noah Robbins, Daniel Flaherty. Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, and Kelvin Harrison Jr.

The cast had to be great because the written word of Aaron Sorkin presented the actors with some of the best dialogue of the year.

This was a winner in many ways.

Going along with the Gomers, we now have the Spider-Man 3 Disappointment of the Year. These are movies that had high levels of anticipation but failed to reach that level. It does not require hating the movie. This award is named after Spider-Man 3, which I do not hate. It had some good things in it. It just failed to be as great as it could have been. Some times the films that win this are horrible, but others are okay.

Previous Winners:  In the Heart of the Sea, The Snowman, Amazing Spider-Man 2, After Earth, Dark Knight Rises, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, Batman v. Superman, Christopher Robin, IT: Chapter Two

This was, of course, a difficult year for this category. A bunch of the films that I was anticipating wound up sent to 2021 because of the pandemic. The movies that I did not know or had only found out about during the year did not fit in this category. There had to be some amount of hope of excellence for there to be disappointment.

Other films that I expected to not be very good such as Doolittle or Bloodshot could not be considered disappointing. Because of all that, the list of these will be lower.

We will start off with our winner….

Tenet

Christopher Nolan insisted on having Tenet released in the theaters and not delayed to 2021 or released on streaming and Tenet paid for it. But that was not why it was disappointing to me. I did head out to the theater to see it. The disappointment was that it was confusing, hard to hear and not a great story. It could have been so much better than what it was. I anticipated this being a film with a major story dealing with a mysterious element, but this was a slog to get through.

I did not hate Tenet, but there were enough issues with the film to make it the Spider-Man 3 Disappointment of the Year,

Runners-Up: I only have three others on this list. The most recent was the Netflix sequel, Christmas Chronicle 2. I so enjoyed the first one of these and I was excited to see the second one but it was dull and such a disappointment. Where as Christmas Chronicle 2 may have been somewhat watchable, Disney +’s release of Artemis Fowl was very much unwatchable. It was truly one of the worst movies of the year and I had been holding out hope that it might be better than I thought. Nope. The third film on this list is the Blumhouse adaptation of Fantasy Island. I used to love this show on TV, and I thought a movie version by the preeminent horror movie studio was a great idea. I love Michael Pena, but he was terribly miscast as Mr. Rourke. Fantasy Island was just terrible.

Surprise! Surprise! Surprise!

For those of you too young to understand the reference of the title of this award, it is named after Jim Neighbors’ character from the Andy Griffith Show and his own eventual spin-off series, Gomer Pyle. Gomer’s catch phrase was “Surprise! Surprise! Surprise!” and that works perfect for this year end list of movies that I expected little from, but surprised me with how good they were.

Some of the films that receive consideration for the Gomer may not necessarily make the Top 30 end of the year list, but they turned out better than I could have imagined.

Previous Gomer Award Winners:  The Gift, Ferdinand, Edge of Tomorrow, We’re the Millers, The Campaign, Ouija: Origin of Evil, Bumblebee, Crawl

These were surprises in a positive way. The films that surprised me with their badness will be in the Spider-Man 3 Disappointment of the Year Award, which is still coming.

So… after some close battles, the Gomer is awarded to….

Greenland

A disaster movie starring Gerard Butler? We’ve seen that before, haven’t we? Well, the answer to that question is yes… as recently as a few years ago with Geostorm. However, we have never seen one like Greenland.

If you can believe it, Greenland is truly more of a character piece than a high-effects, CGI fest where Butler is the super hero everyman (in Geostorm he was a scientist. A scientist?)

Here, the events going on around them are secondary to the struggle and challenges faced by this little family and the problems that they were facing prior to the comet striking the earth. Yes, there are some of the typical beats of a disaster movie, but this film does not feel as if they had to embrace those. It feels as if it through those in as an afterthoguht.

I did not expect to like this one as much as I did, which is why it is the Gomer winner of 2020.

Runners-Up: Black Box on Amazon Prime was one of my favorite Halloween films of the year and it is still underappreciated by many fans. Palm Springs was on Hulu and takes the Groundhog Day story into a different direction in a fun and humorous manner. Hulu ‘s efforts this year included Pooka Lives! a horror/comedy sequel that far surpassed the original. Another Amazon Prime movie was The Vast of Night about an alien arrival on earth in the 1950s. After the hugely disappointing Penguins, Disneynature needed a win for me, and they delivered with the unexpectedly great Disneynature’s Elephant. Shudder tossed a great surprise with the short but terrifying Host.

There were some great documentaries this year. There were actually several more that I saw on TV or as an original on a streaming service than I saw in the theater. I see last year’s winner was Finding Neverland and that was a TV documentary so I do not have to specify that this is for any form of doc.

I should say off the top that a lot of people will probably be wanting the Michael Jordan doc, The Last Dance to make my list, but I did not watch it, so I cannot include it. I know it was a pop culture event so I thought I might mention it.

Here are the list of prior winners of this year end award.

Best Documentary

Previous Winners:  Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, My Scientology Movie, Tickled, Finding Neverland

This year’s runners-up included the following: The Social Dilemma (which was more frightening than most of the horror movies this year). Another disturbing tale was American Murder: The Family Next Door from Netflix about the Watts family murders from 2018. It was a difficult watch as well. Another documentary that messed me up this year was Robin’s Wish, the story of Robin Williams and his final days of his life with Lewy body dementia that led to his suicide. As a huge Robin Williams fan after watching this, I needed an immediate palate cleanser (so I headed to The Princess Bride on Disney +). HBO Max’s The Mystery of D.B. Cooper was more fascinating to me after seeing the trailer for Loki, next year on Disney +. Finally, there was a tremendous five-part documentary series on the WWE Network featuring the story of the Undertaker. It was called Undertaker: The Last Ride and it gave wrestling fans a look at the mysterious Undertaker and showed him the “Dead man” in a way they have rarely seen him. WWE Network also gave us a doc on The Rated R Superstar Edge called You Think You Know Me which was a great look at the returning Edge. WWE really do a fabulous job of creating documentaries about their superstars and giving us a glance behind the curtain of kayfabe. Another fantastic docu-series focusing on the world of pro wrestling (though not produced by WWE) was the second season of The Dark Side of the Ring, which included a powerful and heartbreaking two-part story on the Chris Benoit tragedy.

However, the winner of this award is a documentary series that transcended all of the rest and became a nationwide sensation. It was release on Netflix right at the beginning of the pandemic and, with so many people at home isolated, this was seemingly all anyone could talk about.

Tiger King

Legitimately, the craziness of this Netflix series was what we needed in the world at that time. We saw a ton of downright rotten people whose stories were unbelievable. The feud between Joe Exotic and Carol Baskins kicked this off, but we saw many other unlikable characters that just left you thinking… this can’t be real, right? It has to be because if it were fiction, nobody would be able to accept the story.