• Lootday.com logo
  • Join today to claim your daily loot
English
    • News
    • Guides
    • Gaming
      • Codes
      • League of Legends
      • Lootday
    • Creators
    • Entertainment
    • Careers
    • Lootday
    • EarlyGame+
  • Login
  • Homepage My List Settings Sign out
  • News
  • Guides
  • Gaming
    • All Gaming
    • Codes
    • League of Legends
    • Lootday
  • Creators
  • Entertainment
  • Careers
  • Lootday
  • EarlyGame+
Game selection
Kena
Gaming new
Enterianment CB
ENT new
Influencer 5229646 640
TV Shows Movies Image
TV shows Movies logo 2
Fifa stadium
Fc24
Fortnite Llama WP
Fortnite Early Game
LOL 320
Lo L Logo
Codes bg image
Codes logo
Smartphonemobile
Mobile Logo
Videos WP
Untitled 1
Cod 320
Co D logo
Rocket League
Rocket League Text
Apex 320
AP Ex Legends Logo
DALL E 2024 09 17 17 03 06 A vibrant collage image that showcases various art styles from different video games all colliding together in a dynamic composition Include element
Logo
Logo copy
GALLERIES 17 09 2024
News 320 jinx
News logo
Lootday bg
Guides
More EarlyGame
Logo copy

Galleries

Lootday bg

lootday

News

News

Codes bg image

Codes

Razer blackhsark v2 review im test

Giveaways

  • Copyright 2026 © eSports Media GmbH®
  • Privacy Policy
  • Impressum and Disclaimer
 Logo
English
  • English
  • German
  • Spanish
  • EarlyGame india
  • Homepage
  • TV Shows & Movies

15 Best Movies Lost in the COVID-19 Pandemic

1-15

Nazarii Verbitskiy Nazarii Verbitskiy
TV Shows & Movies - June 16th 2026, 23:55 GMT+2
Bloodshot

15. Bloodshot (2020)

Bloodshot arrived in March 2020 with the worst possible timing, landing in theaters just as the world started shutting down. The Vin Diesel superhero movie about a soldier brought back to life with nanotechnology never got a fair shot at finding its audience. Sure, it follows familiar revenge thriller beats, but the digital blood effects and memory-wiping premise create some genuinely wild action sequences that deserved to be seen on a big screen. Instead of becoming a potential franchise starter, it became a cautionary tale about release timing. | © Sony Pictures

Freaky

14. Freaky (2020)

Freaky takes the body-swap comedy and throws it into a slasher movie, watching Vince Vaughn play a teenage girl trapped in a serial killer's body with surprising commitment. The high concept could have been a disaster, but Vaughn sells every moment of gender confusion while Kathryn Newton gets to be genuinely menacing in return. Director Christopher Landon finds the perfect balance between horror and humor without letting either side feel like an afterthought. The result is a movie that actually earns its R rating while delivering laughs that never come at the expense of the scares. | © Universal Pictures

News of the World

13. News of the World (2020)

Tom Hanks reading newspaper stories to frontier towns sounds like the setup for the most boring Western ever made, but News of the World turns that simple premise into something unexpectedly gripping. The movie works because it never tries to be more than what it is: an old-fashioned story about connection and responsibility, told with the kind of patient craftsmanship that feels almost extinct now. Hanks and Helena Zengel create a believable bond without forcing big emotional moments or manufactured drama. It's the rare Netflix film that actually benefits from being watched at home, where the intimate scale feels right. | © Universal Pictures

The Card Counter

12. The Card Counter (2021)

The Card Counter follows a former military interrogator turned professional gambler who gets pulled into a revenge plot against his old commanding officer. Paul Schrader builds the entire film around Oscar Isaac's controlled performance, letting him carry scenes with nothing but card mechanics and quiet menace. The gambling scenes feel authentic in a way most casino movies fake, because Isaac actually learned to count cards for real. This is Schrader at his most patient and unforgiving, taking 101 minutes to examine guilt that never goes away. | © Focus Features

Petite Maman

11. Petite Maman (2021)

Petite Maman runs just 72 minutes, but Céline Sciamma uses every second to create something that feels both impossibly simple and quietly magical. Eight-year-old Nelly meets another girl her age in the woods behind her grandmother's house, and their friendship unfolds with the kind of natural ease that most movies spend hours trying to manufacture. The twist reveals itself so gently that you might miss it if you blink, turning what seemed like a straightforward childhood story into something much stranger and more tender. Sciamma proves that the most profound ideas don't need grand gestures when the small moments are this perfectly observed. | © NEON

Birds of Prey

10. Birds of Prey (2020)

Margot Robbie's Harley Quinn gets to break free from the Joker's shadow and wreak havoc with a crew of Gotham's most dangerous women. The movie leans hard into R-rated chaos, letting Harley narrate her own messy breakup story while beating people up with baseball bats and roller skates. It feels more like a punk rock fever dream than a typical superhero movie, complete with animated birds and breakfast sandwiches that somehow matter to the plot. Warner Bros. released it right before theaters started closing, which means most people missed how genuinely unhinged and fun it actually was. | © Warner Bros. Pictures
Cropped Saint Maud 2020

9. Saint Maud (2020)

Saint Maud follows a young nurse whose religious devotion slowly warps into something much darker as she cares for a dying patient. Morfydd Clark delivers a performance that makes fanaticism feel both terrifying and tragically human, never letting you forget there's a broken person underneath all that divine certainty. The film builds its horror through psychological suffocation rather than jump scares, trapping you inside Maud's increasingly unhinged worldview until the final moments hit like a slap. A24 released one of the most unsettling character studies in years, and barely anyone got to feel uncomfortable in a theater because of the pandemic. | © A24

Pig

8. Pig (2021)

Nicolas Cage finds a truffle hunter whose beloved pig gets stolen, and somehow that becomes the quietest, strangest performance of his entire career. The movie could have been a simple revenge thriller, but it turns into something much weirder about grief, identity, and what we lose when we stop being who we used to be. Cage barely raises his voice above a whisper for most of the runtime, which makes every moment he does speak feel like it carries actual weight. It's the kind of small, odd film that would have found its audience slowly in theaters, but got buried in the streaming shuffle instead. | © Neon
First Cow

7. First Cow (2019)

First Cow takes the American frontier and strips away all the mythology, leaving behind two men who just want to bake some biscuits and maybe make a little money. Kelly Reichardt builds her entire film around the gentlest possible crime: stealing milk from the only cow in 1820s Oregon Territory to sell pastries to lonely trappers. The pacing moves like actual frontier life, slow and deliberate, which made it nearly impossible to market to audiences expecting shootouts and saloon fights. That careful rhythm is exactly what makes it work, turning capitalism's origin story into something surprisingly tender. | © A24

The Last Duel 2021

6. The Last Duel (2021)

The Last Duel asks the same question three times and gets three completely different answers, each one reshaping what you thought you understood about truth and perspective. Ridley Scott builds the entire film around this structure, showing how the same medieval rape trial looks radically different depending on whose version you're watching. The third telling hits hardest because it strips away the romantic nonsense and shows what actually happened to Marguerite de Carrouges. Most period dramas use history as decoration, but this one uses it to examine how men have always controlled women's stories. | © 20th Century Studios

Cropped last night in soho 2021

5. Last Night in Soho (2021)

Last Night in Soho promised a stylish psychological thriller about a fashion student who mysteriously connects with a 1960s aspiring singer. Still, Edgar Wright's neon-soaked vision quickly turns into something much darker and more unhinged. The film starts as a glamorous time-travel fantasy before morphing into a horror story about trauma, exploitation, and the ugly reality behind nostalgic dreams of swinging London. Wright fills every frame with period detail and visual flair, yet the tonal shifts feel jarring rather than clever. What begins as Anya Taylor-Joy and Thomasin McKenzie playing dress-up in vintage Soho ends up as a bloody meditation on how the past can literally haunt the present. | © Focus Features

Cropped Nightmare Alley

4. Nightmare Alley (2021)

Nightmare Alley arrived with all the craftsmanship you'd expect from the director, then proceeded to bore audiences into submission with its relentlessly grim carnival noir. The film looks incredible and features committed performances from Bradley Cooper and Cate Blanchett, but it stretches a fairly simple con-man story across nearly two and a half hours without much urgency. Del Toro seems more interested in recreating the atmosphere of 1940s Hollywood than in making anyone care about what actually happens. The whole thing feels like watching someone else's very expensive film school project about classic cinema. | © Searchlight Pictures

Cropped West Side Story

3. West Side Story (2021)

West Side Story arrived with the impossible task of justifying its own existence against one of Broadway's most sacred adaptations. The movie succeeds by finding new emotional weight in familiar songs, especially through Rachel Zegler's luminous Maria and the decision to let much of the Spanish dialogue go untranslated. Spielberg treats the material with reverence while still making choices that feel personal rather than dutiful. The craftsmanship is so assured that you forget to ask why this needed to exist at all. | © 20th Century Studios

Cropped William O Neal Judas and the Black Messiah 2021

2. Judas and the Black Messiah (2021)

The FBI informant story gets flipped when Fred Hampton becomes more compelling than the man sent to destroy him. Daniel Kaluuya transforms the Black Panther leader into someone who feels like he could actually change the world, while LaKeith Stanfield makes the betrayal feel inevitable and devastating at the same time. Most biopics struggle to balance politics with personality. This one makes you understand why the government was terrified enough to orchestrate an assassination. | © Warner Bros.
Tenet

1. Tenet (2020)

Tenet asks you to follow a spy thriller where bullets fly backward, explosions collapse inward, and people have entire conversations while moving through time in reverse. Christopher Nolan built the most expensive puzzle box in cinema history, then dared audiences to solve it while wearing masks in half-empty theaters. The film's obsession with temporal mechanics turns every action sequence into a physics lesson that somehow makes less sense the more you understand it. What should have been Nolan's biggest spectacle instead became the movie that proved even the most ambitious blockbuster couldn't force people back into theaters during a pandemic. | © Warner Bros. Pictures

1-15

The pandemic threw the film industry into chaos, and plenty of good movies got buried under closed theaters, delayed releases, and audiences who simply weren't there. These 15 deserved a real moment in the spotlight and never quite got one, lost in the shuffle of a uniquely terrible time to release a film.

  • Facebook X Reddit WhatsApp Copy URL

The pandemic threw the film industry into chaos, and plenty of good movies got buried under closed theaters, delayed releases, and audiences who simply weren't there. These 15 deserved a real moment in the spotlight and never quite got one, lost in the shuffle of a uniquely terrible time to release a film.

Related News

More
Rachael Leigh Cook
Entertainment
15 Actors We Rarely See Anymore
The Strangers 2008
Entertainment
Top 15 Movies About Unwanted Guests Who Refused to Leave
TJ Thyne
Entertainment
15 Actors Who Appeared On Friends Before They Were Famous
The Pursuit of Happyness 2006
Entertainment
15 Movies Based on True Stories That Were Darker in Real Life
Peggy Sue Got Married
TV Shows & Movies
15 Jim Carrey Movies That Were Surprisingly Bad
Cropped world war z
Entertainment
15 Movies That Changed Their Endings After Test Screenings
Halo 3 2007 cropped processed by imagy
Gaming
10 Video Games That Were Meant to End Their Series – But Didn’t
Will Poulter
Entertainment
15 Celebrities Who Look Like They Were Created in a Lab
Monster Hunter Wilds
Gaming
Top 50 Video Game Franchises of All Time
Call of Duty Ghosts 2013 cropped processed by imagy
Gaming
15 Video Games That Really Are As Bad As People Say
Selena Gomez
Entertainment
15 Famous Stars Living With Bipolar Disorders
Sim City
Gaming
15 Old Games That Still Play Great Today
  • All TV & Movies
  • Home

Subscribe to our Newsletter

Sign up for selected EarlyGame highlights, opinions and much more

About Us

Discover the world of esports and video games. Stay up to date with news, opinion, tips, tricks and reviews.
More insights about us? Click here!

Links

  • Affiliate Links
  • Privacy Policy
  • Impressum and Disclaimer
  • Advertising Policy
  • Our Editorial Policy
  • About Us
  • Authors
  • Ownership

Partners

  • Kicker Logo
  • Efg esl logo
  • Euronics logo
  • Porsche logo
  • Razer logo

Charity Partner

  • Laureus sport for good horizontal logo

Games

  • Gaming
  • Entertainment
  • Creators
  • TV Shows & Movies
  • EA FC
  • Fortnite
  • League of Legends
  • Codes
  • Mobile Gaming
  • Videos
  • Call of Duty
  • Rocket League
  • APEX
  • Reviews
  • Galleries
  • News
  • Your Future
  • Lootday
  • Guides

Links

  • Affiliate Links
  • Privacy Policy
  • Impressum and Disclaimer
  • Advertising Policy
  • Our Editorial Policy
  • About Us
  • Authors
  • Ownership
  • Copyright 2026 © eSports Media GmbH®
  • Privacy Policy
  • Impressum and Disclaimer
  • Update Privacy Settings
English
English
  • English
  • German
  • Spanish
  • EarlyGame india