

This country has terrible taste in movies. (Hopper Stone/AP Photo)

If you had any doubts that this country loves really bad movies, these past few days should have cleared them up.

Despite absolutely brutal reviews, Dumb and Dumber To, the sequel that nobody asked for, hauled in more money than any other movie (roughly $36 million) during its debut weekend. The movie, for good measure, currently sports a 15 percent approval rating from "top critics"—the sort of people who see movies for a living—on movie review site Rotten Tomatoes.

"If Dumb and Dumber To were a live comedian, he'd have said, 'Is this an audience or an oil painting?' He'd have left the stage in tears," New York Magazine's review reads.

Dumb and Dumber To, however, is hardly the first terrible movie America has fawned over—or, at the very least, spent inordinate amounts of money on. In fact, the country has fallen a lot harder for a number of other awful flicks.

The 20 worst-rated movies among the top 100 box office earners are dominated by familiar names.The Transformers franchise accounts for three of the top five worst-rated of these movies. The Pirates of the Caribbean movies are all represented in the top 20, as are two of the Twilight movies and Star Wars Episodes I and II.

Transformers: Age of Extinction earned an average Rotten Tomatoes score of 5 out of 100 (meaning that only 5 percent of critics gave the movie a thumbs up). The Da Vinci Code scored an 8. Together they grossed more than half a billion dollars in 2014 dollars.

Eighteen of the top 20 are either sequels or are based on an existing franchise -- Pearl Harbor and The Day After Tomorrow are the two exceptions. Their absymal reviews didn't stop these 20 films from grossing more than $7 billion in 2014 dollars at the box office. Michael Bay directed four of them.

Zoom out, and a fairly clear picture emerges. Nearly a third of the biggest movies in box office history (29 to be exact) failed to crack 50 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, and more than half failed to crack 60 percent, the threshold the site uses to call a movie "fresh," which basically means "worth watching."

So the next time you find yourself wondering how in the world that movie series you can't stand is about to push out yet another sequel, remember there's a pretty good answer: Bad movies, for better or worse—ok, worse—are pretty big business in this country.