The Summer 2025 Box Office in Review

I had given some thought to writing about the summer box office before, but because I wasn't optimistic about how the slate would perform, and didn't want to spend the summer on the morbid exercise of picking apart one failure after another, I decided that I would write just one post about the whole lot at the end of the summer (or as close to it as made no difference, which I consider this to be as it is mid-August, with all the big releases well behind us and any surprises now most unlikely). Setting to that task now it seems best to get two things out of the way at the outset.

1. This summer there was no room to explain away poor results on the basis of a thinner-than-usual release slate (as in 2022 and 2024), or the way in which a strike in Hollywood supposedly undermined publicity efforts by nixing actors' promotional tours (as in 2023). This was pretty much a "normal" summer by any such standard, with a crop of blockbusters that looks fairly respectable by pre-pandemic standards, all as the Suits and their courtiers have had no occasion to unhingedly rant about lowly creatives thinking that work should actually be paid and dementedly add the crappy performance of movies no one was going to see anyway to their list of grievances against said creatives.

2. The box office receipts from this "normal" summer only confirmed what had seemed to me increasingly apparent since 2023, namely that the market for theatrically released movies, long slowly shrinking (with the one-two punch of the Great Recession and the dawn of the Age of Streaming), contracted very abruptly and severely with the pandemic. Where even in the 2010s annual per capita ticket sales in North America were in the 3-4 range, these past few years they have stood at just a little over 2, about a third lower than they had been in the late '10s, with the result a year-end box office take fallen from an average of just a little under $15 billion in July 2025 dollars to $8.6 billion in 2022-2024, and $8.8 billion in 2023-2024. Thus far 2025 looks to be headed toward a gross not far from there, in part due to the level of moviegoing we did see this summer. (In 2022-2024 the combined May-August box office, adjusted from the end of summer figure for July 2025 prices, ranged from $3.6 to $4.2 billion, with the average $3.8 billion. As of August 17 the take in 2025 was a bit under $3.4 billion, broadly on track toward the 2022-2024 norm--as against the price-adjusted 2015-2019 norm of $5.6 billion.)

The result is that I find the increasingly distant pre-pandemic period decreasingly relevant as a point of comparison for the box office as a whole, and 2022, and especially 2023 and 2024, more relevant. However, I still think the pre-pandemic performance of specific movies relevant where gauging the response to particular franchises and genres is concerned. (Putting that into more concrete terms: it is not only fair but necessary to understanding the situation to compare how Marvel's movies are doing today with how they were doing back in the Marvel Cinematic Universe's Phase Three when we consider public receptivity, and the viability of the franchise from a business standpoint, however much the press insists otherwise.)

That said, just what was the big picture this time around? Alas, there was little to challenge my low expectations, and make me rethink my holding off until the effective end of the season before essaying an analysis. Indeed, the single clearest pattern was how so many retreads of long-ago hits underwhelmed, or flat-out flopped, proving skeptics like myself right about there being few people were really hungry for more 28 Days Later (2003) or I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997, and postmodernist pastiche to begin with) or Karate Kid (1984) or Freaky Friday (a 2003 film itself a remake of a story first filmed in 1976)--or even the Smurfs. There was also not much more demand than that for more of such recent successes as John Wick (at least, when minus the actual John Wick), or more M3GAN.

Of course, these movies weren't the real "big guns" of the season, but the pattern did extend to those as well. After all, the trio of major superhero films the summer offered fell far short of bringing back the genre's commercial mojo, singly and collectively. The most successful of the lot, Superman--when we adjust for ticket prices--did rather less business than 2013's less than triumphant Man of Steel from the opening weekend forward. (The 2013 film's gross in its first three days, $117 million at the time, was actually $161 million when we compute for 2025 dollars, as against the 2025 film's $118 million, while the earlier film's adjusted final gross of $461 million compares favorably with the $360 million that seems the best the new Superman can end up with.) Meanwhile the performance of Marvel's yet again drawing together characters from its prior movies to form a superhero team in The Thunderbolts was a far cry from realizing the promise implicit in the movie's rebranding as "The New Avengers" (a sub-$400 million global gross, closer to The Marvels than The Avengers), while the only marginally better performance of the Fantastic Four: First Steps made it clear the third time was not the charm for making a durable franchise out of this classic comic book as its performance instead invited comparison with the calamitous reception of Ant-Man 3. Arriving just months after the similarly underwhelming box office of Captain America: New World Order they made clear that the genuinely strong response to Deadpool & Wolverine did not carry over to the Marvel brand as such the way that all those claqueurs shouting "Marvel's back!" presumed that it did, let alone the existence of any great appetite for more superhero films. (Once more: Deadpool & Wolverine was a rare, scarcely repeatable event of an anti-superhero movie, its success almost irrelevant as proof of interest in a conventional take on the form, and perhaps even testimony to people being so tired of it that they will much more readily come out for a spoof.)

Meanwhile the other big action-adventure franchise movies didn't do much better. Mission: Impossible 8 grossed a little more money than the franchise low that was Mission: Impossible 7, but not much more. At the same time the latest Jurassic Park franchise movie's breaking $300 million domestically only looks impressive because of how poorly everyone else was doing, and because few remember the numbers racked up by its three immediate predecessors. (Jurassic World made twice as much--$652 million, domestic, equal to almost $900 million today--while even the ill-received Dominion did rather better than the newest installment, with $377 million collected domestically against the $340 million that is the newest movie's likely finishing figure.) The downward trend bodes ill for any follow-up very soon.

Amid all the (very numerous) disappointments did no one have anything to cheer about? As it happens the backers of the big animation-to-live-action adaptations had some success, with Lilo & Stitch, and in lesser degree, also How to Train Your Dragon. The promised last of the Final Destination series did fairly well by horror movie standards, with a domestic gross a little shy of $140 million. One can argue that there was some affirmation that people were prepared to come out for something different, at least where movies directed at grown-ups are concerned, certainly to go by the genre-bending Sinners, and perhaps the horror film Weapons too, while it may be that something of the same can also be said for the racing film F1 as well (if in a more superficial way). Still, even the apparent successes must be qualified. Last summer not one but two movies broke the $600 million barrier (Deadpool & Wolverine, and Inside Out 2). The summer before we saw Barbie do the same, and the summer before Top Gun 2. This year only one movie broke $400 million, the live-action Lilo & Stitch, and even then not by enough to match the total of April's Minecraft Movie (all as, one might add, Disney had to bear the flopping of Pixar's Elio, which, unlike 2023's Elemental, did not see sustained interest offer some longer-run redemption for a movie that opened poorly). Overall 2025 can look like 2023 without the late season redemption brought by Barbie and Oppenheimer--all as there seemed little rescue by the foreign markets. (Sinners may have performed very well domestically for an unconventional R-rated non-franchise film, but it has not broken $400 million globally>, leaving it a far cry from the territory of an Oppenheimer, which fell just a very little way short of the billion-dollar club.)

Altogether it seems to me a reminder that the studios, if perhaps trying to be a little cannier about the way they go about it (certainly to go by their caution with money last year), are still playing the same old game in the same old way at a time when the game just doesn't make sense anymore because that contraction of the market has not just meant a smaller pie to divvy up, but qualitatively different terms for getting audiences to the theater. Once more: putting up the tentpole and expecting to sell a billion dollars' worth of tickets that way we saw reach a peak of sorts circa 2019 (when nine movies made that mark) is less and less reasonable. If you want people to blow one of their two trips to the theater this year on your movie you had better give them a good reason to do so, and it being hard to please all of the people all the time the thing to do is clearly to go for targeted successes--maybe once in a while getting to do so on a blockbuster scale (as with Deadpool & Wolverine) but more often aiming for a more modest gross that will bring a relatively high return on a more modest budget (as with It Ends with Us). Still, obvious as this seems, from what I can tell few anywhere near the industry are talking this way, the industry and its courtiers in denial as they live up to one definition of insanity--doing the same thing over and over and over again and expecting a different result as they crank out sequels and prequels and remakes no one asked for and find their company getting deeper and deeper into the hole.