All the talk about the pop star Bad Bunny over the past several months has made my ears perk up — way up. I’ve been thinking about bunnies in movies: the good, the bad, and the fluffy.
Rabbits, especially in their young cute hoppity form, have come to symbolize innocence and vulnerability better than practically anything (besides tribbles). What, then, is a “bad bunny”? A symbol of innocence lost? An anomaly, a trickster, a bunny in wolf’s clothing? The idea of bunnies as innocent is a sentimental notion we’ve imposed on them, and it’s hardly accurate. Some rabbits are aggressive, and one of them even attacked a president. Now that’s a bad bunny.
Before I get into The Screenopolis Bad Bunnies List, let’s talk about Bad Bunny himself. The pop artist and Grammy winner, whose real name is Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, isn’t just a singer-performer. He’s also been in several films, including 2022’s Bullet Train, where he did indeed play a wolf, or rather The Wolf, a Mexican assassin who mixes it up lethally with Brad Pitt at 160 miles per hour on the Japanese rail system. (Fun movie.)
Bad Bunny himself is not Mexican but Puerto Rican, though xenophobic critics of his Super Bowl performance don’t seem to care about the difference. The performer can also be seen in 2021’s F9, 2023’s Cassandro, and 2025’s Caught Stealing. (We’ll do him a favor and pretend he wasn’t in Happy Gilmore 2.)
A quick note about Puerto Rico, for anyone needing a refresher: The Caribbean island has been a territory of the United States for more than a century, and Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens. I only mention this because a large contingent of the right-wing U.S. political class seem to not understand these facts. Or perhaps they elected to ignore them in order to divert and distract public attention away from recent failures of certain, let’s say, executive-branch officials. Including those implicated in the misdeeds of international financiers known for illicit activities on a private island just 86 miles to the east of Puerto Rico.
Though this article is more about bad bunnies than Bad Bunny, we recommend you dive in to his music and background at your leisure. If you’re an English speaker, don’t let his Spanish lyrics dissuade you: There are translations aplenty, and why shouldn’t U.S. citizens try to learn another language? Much of the modern world is bilingual — why are we lagging?
What’s in a Bad Bunny name?
Oddly enough, the story behind Bad Bunny’s name seems ripped from a scene in A Christmas Story. In that movie, which was based on Jean Shepherd’s memoirs, Ralphie (Peter Billingsley) is given a Christmas-morning gift of a bunny suit from his Aunt Clara. He tries it on, walks down the stairs, and is completely miserable as his dad (Darren McGavin) declares him “a deranged Easter bunny… a pink nightmare!” This parallels the Bad Bunny origin story.
As he related in an interview: “When I was a little boy in school, I had to dress up as a bunny, and there’s a picture of me with an annoyed face.” You can see that picture in this article. So not only did that one embarrassing moment set the direction of his musical identity, it also linked him to one of America’s most beloved Christmas movies.
Bad bunnies galore — beyond Bad Bunny
Now on to other bunnies, and not just the bad ones. But mostly the bad ones.
As much as I’d love to talk about other bunny movies, like 2018’s Peter Rabbit (worth it for Rose Byrne and Domhnall Gleeson alone, nevermind the Leporidae), we gotta have some guidelines here. So we’re not going to list every Bugs Bunny cartoon, or the rabbit in Alice in Wonderland, or 1972’s The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds, which doesn’t sound much like it would have a bunny, does it? (Yet it does.)
And when it comes to Thumper, we’re more interested in the Bambi and Thumper from Diamonds Are Forever, where Trina Parks‘s female assassin named Thumper was far more of a “bad bunny” than that cute little foot tapper from the 1942 Disney classic. (Fun fact: Trina Parks was the first African-American Bond Girl.) Works that are bunnyish in name only, like the Jude Law/Jason Bateman Netflix thriller Black Rabbit, also got the rabbit’s foot, er, boot. (Did they sell rabbit’s feet at the Bunny Museum, or would that have been sick?)
Honorable mentions to a few bad bunny scenes. For example, in Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, there’s a very bad bunny in the form of a stuffed animal found in the ruins of Vietnam. The bunny is tied to a booby trap that blows up one of the soldiers, and it’s yet another instance of Kubrick’s tendency to link stuffed animals and “furries” to the evils of mankind. (See also: The Shining.)
On the contrarian indie-film front, Harmony Korine’s Gummo features an impoverished kid whose bunny costume only serves to underscore his vulnerability and helplessness, and really, that’s about all I have to say about Gummo, because just thinking about it gives me twitches as though Chloe Sevigny herself were tweezing my nostril.
And no, The Velveteen Rabbit is not bad, it’s just what happens when bad things happen to good bunnies, especially when they have Pinnochio complexes augmented by outbreaks of scarlet fever.
Now prick up your rabbit ears and nibble on the following bad bunny cinematics, during which we will rate the actual badness of each bunny.
