Looking back on an active and turbulent year at the box office, a number of Hollywood’s major studios came out on top, having tracked more successfully the ever-changing taste of moviegoers.
After the industry started the year with a soft first quarter, Warner Bros. stepped into the lead with a number of original titles, most notably A MINECRAFT MOVIE on April 4th, still standing as the top-grossing movie of the year. They followed that up quickly with SINNERS, arriving April 18th and considered to be a prime contender for the 2025 Best Picture. WEAPONS was another critically acclaimed, and successful WB movie, opening on August 8th.
Warner Bros. was largely satisfied with its first new DC Studios release SUPERMAN to be created under the direction of co-CEOs James Gunn and Peter Safran and the first film in their newly conceived “DC Universe” series of movies, TV series and video games. These successes led Warner Bros. to become the first studio to hit $4 billion in worldwide gross for the year. Alas, the party fizzled in the fourth quarter, without the studio releasing a single new movie to theatres over the final three months of the year.
Disney wound doing even better in 2025, racing to the finish with the wildly successful ZOOTOPIA 2 and James Cameron’s AVATAR: FIRE AND ASH sequel, which did their part to supercharge the studio’s yearly box office sales to more than $6 billion worldwide, the first time Disney has reached that milestone since 2019.
Not all studios are celebrating their success in 2025. Paramount lived much of the year in limbo while its future direction and ownership were being publicly debated, winding up in the hands of Skydance after an extended process. They released only a small number of movies during the year, with the highest-grossing being MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – THE FINAL RECKONING starring Tom Cruise, which opened in mid-year over Memorial Day weekend.
Unfortunately, its $400M production cost made it virtually impossible for the movie to make a profit, a fate that was shared with THE RUNNING MAN, starring Glen Powell, which was also relatively expensive at $110M and underperformed at the box office.
Other studios such as Universal, Sony and A24 had mixed results in 2025. Overall, the box office was flat for the year, which was a somewhat disappointing result for exhibitors who had hoped that the end of COVID and the Hollywood labor strikes would free up the industry to experience a major rebound. On the other hand, experts are now forecasting a significant increase in box office receipts for 2026, giving new hope for the new year.
