Ranking the Addams Family Movies, from Cousin Itt to “It’s Showtime!”
With a loyal fan base already stitched together like Uncle Fester’s love life, The Addams Family made their creepy and kooky leap from the small screen to cinemas in 1991. Riding the coattails of the beloved black-and-white TV show, the film brought buckets of dark humour, death jokes, and the kind of morbid whimsy that somehow still felt perfectly safe for your gran to enjoy after Sunday dinner.
Since then, we’ve had a sequel (one of the best ever made), a couple of animated flicks, and of course, Netflix’s Wednesday, which turned gothic misery into a global teen obsession and turned Jenna Ortega into the world’s new scream queen. But we’re not talking about that one today. Or the other TV spin-offs. No sir.
This is all about the movies, the films, the cinematic Addams Family canon. We’re ranking them from the bottom of the family crypt right up to the top of the mansion, where Morticia sips blood-red wine under the moonlight and Gomez sword-fights a tax collector for fun.
So snap your fingers (twice), brush the cobwebs off your VHS tapes, and dive headfirst into a bubbling cauldron of nostalgia, madness, and murder-themed musicals as we count down the Addams Family films from worst to best. Tish, that’s French!
5. Addams Family Reunion (1998)
If the 90s theatrical films were the filet mignon of spooky family entertainment, Addams Family Reunion is the suspicious meatloaf your aunt made that might be moving. Released straight to video (where all great classics go to be forgotten), this awkward third instalment tried desperately to revive the magic of its predecessors… and ended up looking like a Halloween party thrown in a school gym with budget bin decorations and warm squash.
With Raul Julia sadly having passed away and Anjelica Huston wisely not answering her phone, the studio cast Tim Curry as Gomez (solid choice) and Daryl Hannah as Morticia (questionable choice), and then basically locked them in a mansion with a script that read like it was written by someone who once saw a gif of the Addams Family. The plot, such as it is, involves the Addamses going to a family reunion — except they go to the wrong one, filled with bland, aggressively happy people. Hilarity should have ensued. It didn’t.
Even Tim Curry, usually able to bring Frankenstein’s monster to life with a raised eyebrow and a glittery cape, looks like he’d rather be anywhere else. And bless the child actors — they try their best, but without Christina Ricci’s withering death stares and bone-dry delivery, it’s just a group of kids doing impressions of better kids.
All in all, Addams Family Reunion is kind of like when your mum buys you “Mr. Dr Peppers” instead of Dr Pepper — technically similar, but it leaves a weird taste in your mouth and a lingering sense of betrayal.
The Addams Family 2 (2021)
Animated, brightly coloured, and full of jokes that sound like they were written by an AI that once saw a Hot Topic window display, The Addams Family 2 is a weird one. Not in a good “Uncle Fester is bathing in battery acid again” kind of weird — more like a “why does this movie exist?” weird.
This sequel sees the Addams clan head out on a family road trip across America in a big spooky camper van, which honestly sounds like a fun time. Imagine Morticia in Vegas. Imagine Lurch in a surf shop. Imagine Cousin Itt trying to order at a Taco Bell drive-thru. Unfortunately, the film mostly squanders these ideas with a confusing plot about genetic testing, a mad scientist trying to steal Wednesday, and Bill Hader playing a villain who’s clearly lost in the script and wondering how he got there.
Wednesday Addams is the bright (dark?) spot here, again. She has the best lines, the driest delivery, and the most relatable “please stop speaking to me” energy of any character on screen. But even she can’t save this from feeling like a haunted version of The Emoji Movie. Morticia and Gomez feel sidelined, Fester turns into an octopus (don’t ask), and Thing is criminally underused — and that’s saying something for a disembodied hand.
It’s not completely awful — kids will be distracted for 90 minutes, and there’s at least one genuinely good joke involving a voodoo doll and a karaoke machine. But compared to what came before, The Addams Family 2 is like biting into a caramel apple and realising too late that it’s an onion.
3. The Addams Family (2019)
After years in the cinematic grave, the Addams clan was resurrected once more — only this time in CGI, looking like they’d just escaped a Tim Burton-themed balloon animal convention. The Addams Family (2019) decided to go back to basics by reintroducing everyone’s favourite creepy, kooky, mysterious and spooky family to a new generation. Sadly, this version mostly ends up feeling like a Hot Topic ad written during a sugar crash.
We kick things off with Gomez and Morticia getting chased out of a village by torch-wielding normies on their wedding day (which is honestly a romantic goal). They retreat to a haunted asylum on a New Jersey hilltop, as one does, and raise their children in spooky isolation for over a decade. But then — shock horror — a suburban housing development shows up nearby, and the Addamses find themselves fighting off gentrification, social media influencers, and the true horror of… matching curtains.
This film wants to have the classic Addams charm, and there are flashes of it — mostly from Wednesday, who once again proves she’s the franchise MVP by terrorising the locals with deadpan wit and experimental hair choices. Gomez and Morticia try their best, but their chemistry feels like it was generated in a lab by an algorithm trained on eyeliner and dad jokes. Lurch gets some love, Thing’s still crawling, and Cousin Itt sounds like Snoop Dogg now for some reason. Because sure, why not.
It’s fine. Not good, not terrible — just fine. Harmless spooky fun for the kids with a few decent nods for older fans. If you squint hard enough, it’s like seeing your beloved spooky uncles and aunties in a funhouse mirror. Slightly off, slightly weird, but hey, at least they remembered to include the hand.
2. Addams Family Values (1993)
Now this is how you do a sequel. Bigger, darker, weirder — and with more camp (literally). Addams Family Values doubled down on everything that made the 1991 film so delightfully macabre and gave us a sharp, satirical comedy that honestly, might be even better than the original. And yes, that’s a controversial statement that might get us hexed, but we stand by it like Lurch behind a harpsichord.
The story picks up with Morticia giving birth to baby Pubert, a mustachioed infant so goth he came out wearing eyeliner. Naturally, Wednesday and Pugsley take this as a personal affront and immediately begin plotting the baby’s demise — lovingly, of course. Enter Debbie Jellinsky, the new nanny-slash-seducer-slash-black-widow-serial-killer played to perfection by Joan Cusack. She’s got her eyes on Uncle Fester and his bank account, and Fester, being the emotionally needy mushroom man he is, falls for her faster than you can say “electric chair.”
Meanwhile, in a subplot that could’ve carried its own movie, Wednesday and Pugsley are shipped off to the most aggressively cheerful summer camp in cinematic history. There they’re subjected to pastel torture, musical theatre, and chipper counsellors who would absolutely call the police on a goth teen for existing. Watching Wednesday deliver an unhinged Thanksgiving monologue before setting the place on fire is one of the greatest scenes ever committed to film. We’re not being dramatic. It’s art.
Addams Family Values is wickedly funny, brilliantly acted, and dripping with sarcasm. Christina Ricci cements her legacy as the definitive Wednesday. Angelica Huston and Raul Julia are still the hottest married couple ever to grace a crypt. And Christopher Lloyd somehow makes Fester both grotesque and lovable. The jokes are sharper, the stakes are higher, and the body count is beautifully casual. Values? More like Valueless, and we mean that as a compliment.
1. The Addams Family (1991)
Some reboots limp onto the screen like a reanimated corpse with a bad limp and no soul (hello again, The Munsters). But The Addams Family (1991) didn’t just bring the franchise back from the dead — it threw on a smoking jacket, poured a martini, and tangoed back into our hearts like it had never left.
Against all odds, Barry Sonnenfeld’s film took a 1960s sitcom full of Halloween cosplay and laugh tracks and transformed it into a gothic, whip-smart comedy masterpiece. This wasn’t just a cash-in on nostalgia, this was lightning in a bottle — if the bottle was shaped like a poison vial and had a cobra on the label. The casting alone deserves its own mausoleum plaque. Raul Julia as the debonair, wildly romantic Gomez is the blueprint for loving husbands everywhere (if your husband doesn’t look at you the way Gomez looks at Morticia, he’s not the one). And Angelica Huston? No one has ever slinked into a role with more glamour and menace. Her Morticia is part vampire queen, part burlesque witch, and 100 percent iconic.
Then we’ve got Christina Ricci as Wednesday Addams, deadpanning her way into cultural immortality before she could even legally rent a PG-13 film. Christopher Lloyd vanishes into the role of Fester so convincingly, you forget he was the guy shouting “1.21 gigawatts” just a few years earlier. This is ensemble casting at its absolute finest — the kind of magic you just can’t replicate with AI or Rob Zombie’s directing.
The plot? Fester’s long-lost return to the family might be a con by an evil loan shark mother and her thuggish son. But who cares, really? It’s just an excuse for the Addamses to be delightfully themselves in every single scene. Sword fighting, electrocution games, school plays gone horribly wrong — it’s all deliciously weird, completely quotable, and family-friendly in a “we encourage guillotines at the dinner table” kind of way.
Over 30 years later, The Addams Family still holds up as one of the best TV-to-film adaptations ever made and the perfect gateway drug for kids into horror, goth fashion, and becoming a little bit spooky. It’s endlessly rewatchable, deeply charming, and just morbid enough to please even the grumpiest ghoul in the house. The Addamses aren’t just creepy and kooky — they’re royalty.
