The Shape of the Box Office of 2025

In assessing the 2025 box office my first thought was of how the reality stacked up against my predictions at the end of last year. In particular I was interested in checking whether or not, as I thought, the forecasts so many others had made regard the year's gross had not been overoptimistic; the year had hewed to the pattern I saw in 2023 which seemed likely to be repeated of a pre-pandemic release slate in a shrunken post-pandemic market (reduced by a third), with the result too many tentpoles for the number of ticket-buyers to go around, leading to a large number of disappointing grosses; the claim that "Marvel's Back!" in the wake of Deadpool's success in 2024 proved wrong-headed as that film proved to have borne out interest in Deadpool, not the Marvel brand as a whole as the year's three major Marvel theatrical releases underperformed; and in general, the year's grosses conformed to the impression I have had for many years of increasing superhero fatigue and sci-fi actioner fatigue and franchise fatigue and the decreasing viability of the Hollywood blockbuster strategy so reliant on them for so long. As it turned out, what seemed to me was likely to happen, did happen, with the year's gross, instead of the $9-$10 billion so many hoped for instead under $8.7 billion, thanks to a large number of underperforming films--not least the three Marvel releases that showed that Deadpool was the exception, not the rule, for the sinking ship that this onetime king of the franchises has become.

Now, with the inflation data for the year out I am looking at the numbers again a little more closely, not least for how those of 2025 compare with those of 2023-2024, and 2015-2018. Doing so affirms that 2025 saw a gross 1.5 percent down from that of 2024, when a strike-thinned release slate was supposed to have been responsible for the soft gross, and down 8 percent from that of 2023, when the slate was pretty packed--and thus a more suitable point of comparison for how 2025 really did. In the process the gross continued its slippage from the level of 2015-2019--the figure for 2025 just 58 percent of that level (as against 59 percent in 2024 and 63 percent in 2023), suggesting that even after the dramatic drop of the pandemic period (which had me estimating a structural shrinkage of about a third) the erosion is still quite visibly continuing, rather than the situation stabilizing, let alone any recovery ongoing in the way some in the entertainment press at least pretend to continue to hope in spite of the evidence of the numbers from year to year since the pandemic.

In the face of this trend does Hollywood have options? As I have been saying for two years now they would do better to make cost-effective, well-targeted films than to pour money into tentpoles that nobody asked for (and those who never asked for them ever more inclined to take a pass on them entirely), and also make the most of the international opportunities open to them (as perhaps they mean to do in China, to go by what Disney did with the Zootopia sequel). Still, the problem right now is far bigger than anything Hollywood does. So far as I am concerned no discussion of the matter of the weak film grosses we are seeing is at all complete without acknowledgment of the extreme financial stress the public finds itself under today, one reflection of which is its passing up on all sorts of little luxuries they took for granted in better times, like dining out, and going to concerts, and yes, taking in a movie in a theater rather than contenting themselves with the offerings available to them on littler screens--the "affordability crisis" about which, of course, government has done nothing and shows no interest in doing anything positive. Indeed, elite unwillingness to address the issue is only underlined by the ways in which they pretend to address them (as seen in Ezra Klein and company's feeble sales pitch for the economic and political stupidity that is the blatantly neoliberal "Abundance" agenda). As the last implies I see no grounds for expecting any improvement in that part of the sorry picture, with all that means for Hollywood's share in it.