Why Has There Been No Deadline Most Valuable Blockbuster Tournament 2025?

For many of those who follow the box office these days Deadline magazine's annual Most Valuable Blockbuster "tournament"--their analysts' report ranking Hollywood's biggest profit- and loss-makers during the preceding year, colorfully organized as the film business' equivalent of March Madness (complete with the capping of the tournament illustrated with a photo-shopped picture of the "MVB"'s director(s) making a slam dunk)--is something of an eventual event. However, at the time of this writing it is mid-July without 2025's tournament even having started, or even any sign that it ever will start.

I don't have any inside info here. But I also think there is a very obvious possible explanation--namely that amid the present hard times for Hollywood, and the big studio buyouts, there is more than the usual squeamishness about shining a spotlight on the facts of the situation, certainly at a Hollywood "Establishment" publication like the Penske-owned magazine Deadline. After all, just consider the history of the "tournament." Deadline first held a tournament for 2013 (the following March madness season, of course) and then held one annually thereafter for the next six straight years (2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019. There were no tournaments for the next two years (2020 and 2021) because of the extreme disruption of the box office by the pandemic, but the magazine resumed the tradition with a tournament for 2022, and continued with tournaments for 2023 and 2024.

Of course, the gross in 2022 was just a bit over half the pre-pandemic norm when adjusted for inflation. However, that was an immense improvement over 2020-2021, with the performance of the Spider-Man, Top Gun and Avatar sequels especially reassuring to those hoping business would soon return to normal by showing that would-be blockbusters could still reap ten figure grosses; attribute the fact that it hadn't in 2022 was a matter of the year's having fewer big movies out than usual; and expect that with the following year's "normal"-sized release slate of big movies the box office would zoom back to where it had been before COVID-19, and everyone be able to look back on the blow the pandemic dealt the movie business as something they had all got over, with 2022 a milestone in the recovery. (We did it! Yay us!) However, it didn't work out that way, with 2023, in spite of being far more packed with big movies, not seeing Hollywood gross much more than it did in 2022, the packed slate instead producing a very large number of severe underperformers. (Remember the DCEU's The Flash? The Marvels? Indiana Jones 5?)

Taking in the picture at year's end I argued that the box office of 2023 bespoke structural changes in the market, specifically that American movie going had fallen for the long haul (from 3-4 per capita movie ticket sales to not much more than 2); that this meant as many movies as before were chasing perhaps just two-thirds as many dollars; that big franchise films especially were going to have a rough time not only because of their high budgets, but because those billion-dollar grosses depended on their drawing the casual moviegoer not so easily won now; that in fact if you wanted people to use one of their two trips to the theater this year for your movie, so to speak, you had to really excite them by offering something they really, really wanted rather than grinding out more sequels and prequels no one ever asked for--perhaps something "completely different." (Thus was it the case that without the non-franchise films Barbie and Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer, and less expected hits from an animated Super Mario Bros. film to a Taylor Swift concert film, the unenviable situation would have been even worse still.)

Of course, that wasn't what the Hollywood Establishment wanted to hear, and so everyone who talked that way was ignored (and not only when they were doing so on a humble blog like this one). Instead said Establishment preferred to scapegoat Hollywood's workers, whining about the strikes and the way they delayed some releases and undermined publicity for others--and speak "adults in the room" stupidities about Marvel's underperformance a matter of their having failed to get "better" writers and "supervise" their directors properly, which their lickspittle courtiers in the relevant corners of the press faithfully conveyed to the public in the time-honored propaganda model manner of takers of brass checks for service rendered everywhere. They also continued to cleave to these idiocies through 2024, because if that year saw the box office slip from what it had been in 2023 there was a thinner release slate due to strike-era disruptions (for which, of course, they again blamed the workers), while, at least at a glance, the list of movies that did make money was dominated by franchise films per usual, with a few of them especially encouraging to those who wanted to go on working in the same old way, particularly the animated sequel Inside Out 2, and Deadpool & Wolverine. Sure that this meant Hollywood could go back to and sustain pre-pandemic grosses with sequels to the same old franchises that no one ever asked for, the media cheered "Marvel's back!" as Disney-Marvel announced a new crop of Super Russo Brothers-directed installments of The Avengers.

Not so fast, I said, strongly suspecting that Deadpool & Wolverine was an anomaly and an outlier, and no proof of the broad demand for Marvel movies on which the Universe's backers were banking, or for that matter, any of the rest of what Hollywood was so eager to sell. But of course that wasn't what the Establishment wanted to hear that any more than they did what we had to say about 2023, and so while many of us were perfectly capable of guessing what 2025 would really be like (another 2023-like pre-pandemic slate launched into the shrunken 2025 market to chase its smaller pool of dollars held by pickier moviegoers) the Hollywood Establishment were all shocked, shocked I tells ya when 2025 gave the lie to the industry "optimism" of the preceding years, that 2023 was a fluke, that for all its troubles 2024 showed things were getting back on track, that franchise movies were still the thing, that "Marvel's back!" because it wasn't, as Captain America 4 and The Thunderbolts and the third-time-isn't-the-charm Fantastic Four film all proved, as 2025 saw theaters take in even less money than 2024 in real terms, and as a result actually make 2023 look like a good year by comparison. Indeed, even Establishment-approved commentators were starting to say "It's starting to look like the market maybe isn't going back to what it was before the pandemic . . ."

That 2025 dealt that optimism such a blow has not made the editors of publications like Deadline more eager to dig into the business' numbers, and if anything less so. Especially as 2025 piled yet another terrible year atop a half decade of on the whole atrocious ones, pushing the business closer to the brink, maybe very close indeed (however little the entertainment press admits it). Given the debt the studios had amassed even before the pandemic and the higher interest rates of the last few years, given the abundance of dodgy accounting (just consider how all those streaming revenues involve related-party deals, and the mysteries of "back catalog" value, and how often we hear a film cost far more than the studio initially admitted), I found myself thinking of Emmanuel Todd's post-Enron prediction of a massive write-down of the values of American business. Todd's prediction didn't come to pass at the time--but ever since it has felt as if it could, with Hollywood seeming to me an especially likely candidate between its vulnerabilities and all that was happening. Meanwhile the assault on Tinseltown by the swaggering "move fast and break things" idiots of Silicon Valley, which has seen a certain shiny-headed space rocket-launching individual who, if no match for Ernst Stavro Blofeld when it comes to sophistication, did what Blofeld could not by getting control of James Bond, while we all now have to look at Larry Ellison's ungulate's rear end of a face all the time because of his family's not just taking over Paramount and all connected with it, but trying to take over Warner Bros. too (as they lamely tell us that really they're not building a monopoly--Heavens no!--but saving us from one, because Netflix, with the media as obsequious as usual in repeating after them).

Still, those interested in these matters are hardly lost without Deadline's tournament, as you could probably come pretty close to what they would offer you by applying some basic rules of thumb to some fairly widely circulated information. Just remember the difference between studio net and gross on the production budget and the grain of salt with which one should accordingly take reports of figures not clearly identifying the measure; that the studios lay out a large sum beyond the production budget on the promotion and distribution of the film (sometimes as much as they spend on its production, but these days usually significantly less--the studios less prolific than before with their outlay here); that movie studios usually end up with a little under half of the reported theatrical gross; that they make a sum equivalent to 50-100 percent of that in the relatively short term from video, streaming, broadcast rights, etc., to go on top of the net (more in the case of low-grossing films, less in the case of high-grossers); and you have a rough and ready formula for broadly computing how a movie did. Thus the makers of a $150 million (net) movie probably spent $75-$150 million spent over and above the production to get it seen, meaning a net outlay of $225-$300 million. The result is that the movie could break even on as little as $225 million grossed and $110 million or so netted in the theater--yes, that little, because even if that still leaves the movie in the red the video, etc. may provide the minimum required to staunch the gap. Meanwhile if the movie pulls in $300 million it is on still surer ground, at $400 million one can be confident that it has at least broken even, and at $500 million a healthy profit is very probable, with said profit only growing north of that point (though who gets a hold of it might be up for argument, if a star got a Tom Cruise-in-Top Gun-2-like deal), with the rest likely to be a matter of the fine details, not unimportant, not without their share of surprises, but in the end unlikely to alter the big picture quite so much (e.g. "Will Megalopolis be #2 or #4 on the year's biggest flops list?"), and certainly that as given the public by the folks at Deadline.