John Waters still publishes his year‑end top ten before most critics have even finished their screeners, and that alone tells you how little he cares about consensus. This year he handed Ari Aster‘s Eddington the crown with the kind of backhanded endorsement only the Pope of Trash can deliver: “disagreeable but highly entertaining,” “terrifyingly funny,” “confusingly chaste and kinky,” and—if you don’t like it—he hates you. That last line is the sort of weaponized quote A24’s marketing people would sacrifice interns for.
- How Eddington’s Posters Primed John Waters’ Endorsement
- How the Rest of John Waters’ 2025 List Frames the Year
- What John Waters’ 2025 Top 10 Is Really Saying
- FAQ
- Why does John Waters keep crowning polarizing Ari Aster movies as the year’s best?
- Is he just trolling by putting Final Destination: Bloodlines at number two?
- What does Waters’ love for Eddington say about A24’s direction in 2025–2026?
- Has John Waters mellowed with this slightly less outrageous top ten?
I’ve been tracking Waters’ lists for more than twenty years and the pattern is brutally consistent: if mainstream critics ignored something or openly hated it, there’s a decent chance it lands in his top three. Eddington—mixed reviews, walkouts and ovations at the same festival screenings, loud online fights—fits that pattern so perfectly it almost feels engineered. The fact that Waters already crowned Aster’s three‑hour panic attack Beau Is Afraid in 2023 only doubles down on the signal: in his eyes, Aster is the one American filmmaker still delivering the kind of “originality” and “nerve” he spent his own career weaponizing.
How Eddington’s Posters Primed John Waters’ Endorsement
Eddington’s marketing told you exactly what kind of film this was long before Waters blessed it. The Cannes teaser one‑sheet is brutally simple: a grainy black‑and‑white image of buffalo tumbling off a cliff, the “Festival de Cannes 2025 Official Selection – Competition” laurel at the top, the deadpan tagline “Hindsight is 2020” in the middle, and the title stamped in screaming red at the bottom. No stars, no faces, just a mass suicide metaphor and a pandemic‑era wink. That’s not selling comfort. That’s daring you to show up.
Later, for the wide release, A24 pivoted to the big, illustrated western one‑sheet: Joaquin Phoenix in a white cowboy hat looming over a collage of Pedro Pascal, Emma Stone, Austin Butler and the rest of the cast, all bathed in a dust‑cloud of orange and red. At the bottom, a sheriff figure fires an automatic weapon across a blood‑red sun, while the credits line‑up marches underneath and “IN THEATERS JULY 18” plants a flag. It’s like someone welded a ’70s political thriller paperback to a grindhouse action poster. Festival crowd gets the stark allegory; general audience gets “star‑studded, pissed‑off Americana.”
Waters’ language—“exhausting as today’s politics,” “characters nobody could possibly root for”—slots neatly between those two images. The buffalo poster is literal collective self‑destruction; the painted one‑sheet is a country engulfed in its own fire. Together they frame Eddington as the movie that will grind you down and then dare you to laugh anyway. Of course that’s the film Waters wants at #1.
How the Rest of John Waters’ 2025 List Frames the Year
The rest of the John Waters 2025 list is classic sleight of hand. In the #2 spot sits Final Destination: Bloodlines—the new reboot of New Line’s death‑trap franchise, which he calls “the best sequel to the coolest cinematic franchise ever.” Translation from Waters‑speak: he’s reminding everyone that ruthlessly staged carnage, when it has personality, can be more honest filmmaking than half the prestige dramas currently clogging awards season.
Then he swerves straight into the deep end: The Oslo Trilogy, Óliver Laxe’s Sirāt, Mathias Broe’s Sauna, Room Temperature, Alain Guiraudie’s Misericordia, François Ozon’s When Fall is Coming, Mariska Hargitay’s My Mom Jayne, Bruno Dumont’s The Empire. To a typical U.S. awards voter, that bottom half might as well be a foreign language. To programmers, critics and festival die‑hards, it’s a to‑do list.
Here’s the full top ten as Waters published it for 2025:
- Eddington (Ari Aster)
- Final Destination: Bloodlines (Zach Lipovsky, Adam B. Stein)
- The Oslo Trilogy (Dag Johan Haugerud)
- Sirāt (Óliver Laxe)
- Sauna (Mathias Broe)
- Room Temperature (Cooper/Farley)
- Misericordia (Alain Guiraudie)
- When Fall is Coming (François Ozon)
- My Mom Jayne (Mariska Hargitay)
- The Empire (Bruno Dumont)
If you’re looking for billion‑dollar superheroes or IP behemoths, you’re in the wrong church. The closest this list gets to mainstream is a Final Destination movie, and even to earn that slot you apparently had to out‑gross half of Cannes on nerve alone.
What John Waters’ 2025 Top 10 Is Really Saying
- Ari Aster is now the patron saint of “too much”
Two #1 picks in three years put Aster in rare company. Waters is effectively telling adventurous viewers: if you want modern provocation, you’ll find it in Eddington before you find it in anyone’s tasteful festival darling. - Studio horror can still out‑muscle prestige drama
Bloodlines ranking above Laxe, Guiraudie, Ozon and Dumont isn’t trolling; it’s a statement. A perfectly engineered Final Destination set‑piece, in Waters’ worldview, has more cinematic honesty than ninety percent of “issue movies” with respectable posters. - The arthouse deep cuts are a programming note, not a flex
Sirāt, Sauna, The Oslo Trilogy and the rest are less about showing off how much he’s seen and more about handing festivals and streamers a curated shopping list. Slot these, or admit the 78‑year‑old Pope of Trash is doing better discovery work than your algorithm. - Awards‑season narratives simply don’t register
No Oscar frontrunners, no box office darlings, no algorithm‑bait crowdpleasers. The John Waters 2025 list is aggressively uninterested in campaigns, which is precisely why it gets screenshotted, shared and angrily debated every December.
FAQ
Why does John Waters keep crowning polarizing Ari Aster movies as the year’s best?
Because Aster is one of the very few American filmmakers whose work still feels like it could get booed at Cannes and revered a year later. Waters spent decades being told his own movies were unreleasable; recognizing that same refusal to play nice in Eddington is close to personal for him.
Is he just trolling by putting Final Destination: Bloodlines at number two?
No. He’s hammering home the point he’s been making since Pink Flamingos: a ruthlessly effective genre machine with zero pretension can be more honest and more alive than most “serious” dramas. If a Final Destination reboot has more personality than half the awards slate, Waters will happily say it out loud.
What does Waters’ love for Eddington say about A24’s direction in 2025–2026?
It suggests the studio is still willing to back divisive, expensive swings that split audiences down the middle instead of chasing safe consensus hits. That’s risky in the current market, but endorsements like the John Waters 2025 list give a film like Eddington a second life once opening‑weekend headlines fade. It becomes cult currency, not just another box‑office data point.
Has John Waters mellowed with this slightly less outrageous top ten?
Hardly. Putting a studio gore sequel above half of Europe’s arthouse output is still a deeply impolite move. He hasn’t mellowed; he’s simply updated the targets. Instead of scandalizing bourgeois tastes like in the ’70s, he’s now poking holes in the idea that “serious cinema” has to look and behave a certain way.
John Waters ends every list the same way: unapologetic, gleeful, and more than ready to fight over every slot. Eddington wouldn’t crack my own top ten for 2025, but when a list this combative plants its flag so firmly, you either rewatch the film or admit you’ve lost touch with where the real cult energy lives. So if you line up your favorites against the John Waters 2025 list, which title are you suddenly dying to see—or re‑evaluate—and which one makes you want to tear the whole thing up and start again?
