A new horror movie has earned a 0% score during its Rotten Tomatoes debut. Like any genre, horror tends to have major critical ups and downs. While many entries in the genre are well-respected classics with stellar reviews, including 2017's Get Out (which has a near-perfect 98% score on Rotten Tomatoes), 1991's The Silence of the Lambs (95%), 1975's Jaws (97%), and 1960's Psycho (97%), others have been widely lambasted, including 1987's Jaws: The Revenge (2%), 2002's FeardotCom (3%), and 2022's Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey (3%).

However, early 2025 has been a fertile period for horror movies that are both critically and commercially successful. While April and May have seen the most success, three of the Top 20 highest-grossing movies of 2025 in general are entries in the genre, namely February's The Monkey (which has a 78% Rotten Tomatoes score and grossed $68.6 million worldwide against a reported budget of $11 million), May's Final Destination: Bloodlines (92%, $234.9 million against $50 million), and April's Ryan Coogler's Sinners (97%, $351.6 million against $90 million). So far, June does not seem set to continue this trend.

The Ritual Is Being Rejected By Critics

The New Exorcism Movie Stars Al Pacino

The Ritual has been lambasted by critics. The horror movie, which purports to be based on the true story that inspired The Exorcist, follows priests Theophilus Riesinger (The Irishman's Al Pacino) and Joseph Steiger (The Guest's Dan Stevens) reluctantly working together to exorcise a possessed woman named Emma Schmidt (Chilling Adventures of Sabrina's Abigail Cowen). The 2025 horror movie, which was directed by David Midell (NightLights), also stars Ashley Greene (Twilight) and Patricia Heaton (Everybody Loves Raymond).

Al Pacino has been nominated for nine Oscars, winning one for 1992's Scent of a Woman.

Rotten Tomatoes has now calculated an official Tomatometer score for the new Al Pacino horror movie The Ritual ahead of its United States theatrical premiere. While the score could fluctuate if and when more reviews are added, at the time of writing it has 26 reviews, all of which are negative, which has earned it a rare 0% score. This is the lowest-possible score for a movie on the review aggregator platform. In its reviews with five-star scoring systems, the movie has generally received ratings of between one and two stars, though several critics have given it 0.5 stars.

What This Means For The Ritual

It May Be Cemented As The Worst-Reviewed Horror Movie In A Decade

If it maintains this 0% score, 2025's The Ritual could end up on Rotten Tomatoes' list of the worst-reviewed horror movies of all time. The list, for which the movie is eligible because it only factors in movies with more than 20 reviews, currently only features five movies with 0% scores, namely 2008's One Missed Call, 2009's Homecoming, 2011's Beneath the Darkness, and 2016's Cabin Fever and The Disappointments Room. This would make the new movie the first major 0% horror title of the 2020s as well as the first in 9 years.

Source: Rotten Tomatoes