With 2025 almost in the rearview mirror, it’s as good a time as any to assess the year in film, particularly since it has been a considerable improvement over the comparatively listless 2024.
Not that one would necessarily know it’s been a positive year from box-office receipts. It’s no secret that moviegoing has been on the proverbial ropes in the wake of the covid pandemic, crippling strikes by the screen actors and writers guilds, and a surfeit of streaming options that has revolutionized how people consume entertainment. As of this writing, North American ticket sales for 2025 represent a modest increase over last year, but grosses remain more than 20 percent below pre-pandemic levels. The recovery underway – if it is a recovery – is slow, and the newest bogeyman of AI isn’t exactly fueling optimism in Hollywood.
Out with the new, in with the old
But Hollywood’s saving grace, financially speaking, might be its collective lack of creativity. Audiences love to grouse that moviemakers aren’t coming up with new ideas and stories, but there is little incentive for studio executives to tax their imagination when well-established IP is putting butts in seats. Of the year’s 20 most commercially successful films, only Sinners, F1: The Movie and One Battle After Another were not a remake, reboot, sequel or based on computer games or comic books.
Live-action remakes of Lilo & Stitch and How to Train Your Dragon were bona fide hits despite middling reviews, raking in $423.7 million and $262.9 million in domestic sales. An anodyne installment in the Jurassic Park franchise, Jurassic Park: Rebirth, earned $339.6 million stateside. While superhero flicks are no longer the automatic payday they once were (Madame Web, anyone?), reboots of Superman and the Fantastic Four were moderately profitable, as was even the critically drubbed Captain America: Brave New World. The Minecraft Movie’s domestic opening drew a record $163 million and is sitting on more than $423 million. While more entertaining than it had any right to be, the cinematic adaptation of a 15-year-old gamer mainstay doesn’t exactly represent out-of-the-box thinking.
But there have been plenty of IP financial disappointments. While Hollywood is banking on some holiday releases (we’re looking at you, Avatar: Fire and Ash), 2025 is strewn with the shattered expectations of glass-jawed underperformers like Snow White, Tron: Ares, The Smashing Machine, Christy and The Running Man.
Industry observers are skeptical that theaters can rebound from the reality of streaming services. Matthew Belloni, arguably the nation’s most influential reporter covering show business, says we are witnessing “the real-time disintegration of a 100-year-old industry.” Cinephiles know the singular joys from the communal experience of watching a movie on a screen 30 feet high, but evidently it doesn’t trump the convenience of streaming. According to the Associated Press, only 16 percent of Americans go to a theater each month, compared to 32 percent who stream a new release monthly. Why venture out when you can wait a few weeks and see the latest wannabe blockbuster without having to leave the comforts of your home – or even the toilet, for that matter?
Horror still a scream
The horror genre, typically modestly budgeted and high-yield, has long been a sure thing for the box office. This year is no exception, with scary pictures topping domestic sales over at least 11 weekends. Horror IP has been dependable, with The Black Phone 2, The Conjuring: Last Rites and Final Destination: Bloodlines among the financial winners.
Some of 2025’s most artistically lauded films are horror entries. Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, set in the Mississippi Delta of the 1930s, mashes vampires with the Black experience in the Jim Crow South. What initially looks like an incongruent match turns out to be a nifty metaphor on cultural appropriation. Weapons, the sophomore effort of former sketch comic Zach Cregger, builds on the promise he showed in 2022’s Barbarian. Employing a nonlinear structure steeped in mystery, Weapons offers a fictional town where an entire third-grade class disappears into night. The 28 Days Later franchise received new blood – and spattered blood, at that – with the reunion of director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland; 28 Years Later provides the requisite zombie gore within the context of an affecting coming-of-age story. Another terrific genre pic, writer-director Ben Leonberg’s Good Boy, presents a haunted house tale from the perspective of a dog.
Ripped from the headlines
In the politically polarized America of 2025, where trolling and doomscrolling are national pastimes, a handful of movies are meeting the moment. Movie buffs had eagerly awaited Paul Thomas Andersom’s One Battle After Another, which marks the filmmaker’s biggest budget to date and first work since 2002’s Punch-Drunk Love set in the modern day. The film’s critical reception this fall was near-rapturous. A crackerjack comic-thriller about an ex-leftist terrorist’s search for his teenaged daughter, One Battle felt like it had been written only weeks ago, even though PTA had been thinking about the project for many years. Christian nationalism, the current crackdown on illegal immigration, and left-wing terrorism factor prominently in this mainstream entertainment likely to earn Oscer nominations for stars Leonardo Di Caprio, Sean Penn, Benicio Del Toro and Teyana Taylor.
But it isn’t the only film to resonate with topicality. Ari Aster’s Eddington satirizes the social tumult of the pandemic, while Luca Guadagnino’s After the Hunt examines cancel culture and gender politics on an Ivy League campus. Both films, the work of talented provocateurs, predictably divided audiences and critics alike. Bugonia, the fourth collaboration between director Yorgos Lanthimos and his muse Emma Stone, mines black comedy from the wells of conspiracy-mongering endemic to the Internet and social media.
Every generation needs its cautionary tale of nuclear apocalypse, it seems. Baby boomers had Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb and Fail-Safe. GenX had The Day After and Threads. Now GenZ has A House of Dynamite. Veteran director Kathryn Bigelow posits what would happen if a nuclear warhead was heading toward the United States, and it ain’t reassuring. Shot documentary-style, House of Dynamite crackles with relevance given today’s eruptive global politics.
Cutting to the Chase with Phil Bacharach 