2025 Should Finally Be the Year the Box Office Has Been Waiting For – Will It Be?

After the most turbulent four-year period ever faced by the movie theater industry, 2025 looks to be the year that exhibitors and studios have long waited for. That’s because they will finally get a sense of what the new box office normal looks like, after COVID-19 shut down theaters for a year and changed moviegoing habits for good.

“Everything we see in the years to come will be compared to 2025, not to 2022 or to 2019,” one studio executive told TheWrap.“This is going to be the new benchmark.”

The struggles of rebuilding after the pandemic, with audiences slowly returning in 2021 and studios navigating production backlogs in 2022, tainted the long-term data about moviegoing habits, even as films like “Spider-Man: No Way Home,” “Top Gun: Maverick” and “Avatar: The Way of Water” proved that Hollywood could produce a global hit as huge as they did before 2020.

Then the double labor strikes derailed hopes that 2023 or 2024 would be the first “normal” year, leading to delays that contributed to last May becoming the worst at the box office in a quarter century. The mantra of “Survive ’til ’25” that flowed through the film industry was particularly true for theaters, which need consistent releases above all else.

That consistency will begin with a slow start this weekend with the Sony comedy “One of Them Days” and the Universal/Blumhouse horror film “Wolf Man,” alongside an expansion of A24’s top Oscar contender ”The Brutalist.” In February, Marvel Studios will provide the big tentpole of the first quarter with “Captain America: Brave New World.”

Assuming no major setbacks in 2025, Gower Street Analytics is projecting a domestic box office total of $9.7 billion, up from the $9.04 billion recorded by Comscore in 2023.

While that’s still short of the $11.3 billion recorded before inflation adjustment in 2019, exhibitors tell TheWrap that a $10 billion year is not off the table, especially considering that the slate for the second half of the year could see several more additions. This time last year, Disney had not yet announced that it was adding “Moana 2” to its slate, and that film has made nearly $400 million domestic and $900 million worldwide after five weekends.

But the extent of the optimism varies depending on whom you ask, Daniel Loria, SVP of content strategy at BoxOffice, said.

“I have heard multiple exhibitors say they believe it is not unrealistic that we could hit $10 billion,” Loria told TheWrap. “Studios and premium format execs think it is closer to $9 billion. At BoxOffice, we’ve taken all those varying perspectives into account for our domestic projections, which we put at $9.3 billion to $9.7 billion.”

One reason why there’s so much optimism among exhibitors is that the 2025 slate should be free of the weeks-long droughts that have plagued theaters over the past three years. Take 2022, for example, which saw the mid-summer highs of “Top Gun: Maverick” and “Jurassic World: Dominion” give way to a deep early autumn slump, including a September where grosses fell to the lowest level since 1996.

One studio executive believes that the industry will be able to put such slumps behind them as the frequency of theatrical releases increases. Currently, Comscore estimates there will be 110 films released wide in 2,000 North American theaters, more than the 101 released in 2023. The executive believes that count could increase to 120 or more.

“If you look at the first quarter, there’s a lot of volume,” the executive said. “We haven’t seen that in a few years. You have breadth, volume and a wide variety of anticipated tentpoles, and that’s everything we need to figure out what the new normal is and how the audience is responding.”

Earlier this month, the National Association of Theater Owners released a report that outlined other reasons for optimism. Frequent moviegoers are on the rise, as evidenced by a 12% increase in theater loyalty program members in 2024 to 112 million nationwide, the report showed.

NATO also cited a survey from Mintel that found that 85% of moviegoers surveyed plan to go to theaters more frequently in the next 12 months than they did in the previous 12. Eager to make a good impression with those moviegoers, the top eight circuits in the U.S. and Canada are investing a combined $2.2 billion in updates and refurbishments to their multiplexes.

“As theatrical exhibition heads into 2025, it does so bolstered by consumer excitement for movies on the big screen, a continuing and strengthening commitment to serve the movie-going public and enhance the experience for all, and an increased movie production slate across all important genres to ensure that there is something for everyone at the cinema,” NATO’s report read.

Falling short of 2010s box office levels before inflation adjustment would be a glass-half-empty scenario. Loria noted that while the recovery process for the film industry is progressing steadily, the post-strike slowdown in green lighting projects adopted over the past year will still impact the number of wide releases. So will the wave of consolidation that has already hit theaters with Disney’s acquisition of 20th Century Fox. That could continue to take a toll under an M&A-friendly Trump administration.

“Even in the best-case scenario, we’re still not going to be back to pre-pandemic numbers, and a big reason for that is that there’s one less studio putting out a full slate,“ Loria said. “That’s going to stretch out how long it takes for numbers to rise.”

The year ahead

The opening quarter of 2025 also reflects that “half-full or half-empty” question when it comes to the potential for increased numbers. On the one hand, the sheer frequency of films in the opening months is far greater than the last two years, reducing the possibility of a drought.

“Captain America: Brave New World,” will be a big test of the MCU’s ability to get fans wary of the franchise’s post-“Avengers: Endgame” inconsistency back on board ahead of the return of Robert Downey Jr. in “Avengers: Doomsday” next year.

February will also showcase lower budget films like Sony/StudioCanal’s “Paddington in Peru” and Universal/87North’s “Love Hurts,” which marks the first lead role for Oscar winner Ke Huy Quan after his big return to Hollywood in “Everything Everywhere All at Once.”

On the “half-empty” side, the March slate does not have the tentpole power of years past. Films like “Dune: Part Two,” “Creed III” and “Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire” have all launched to strong starts in recent years. In 2025, the highest profile March release will be Disney’s remake of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” a film whose trailer has been negatively received. The film risks being a flop for the entertainment giant after a 2024 in which all of its major films dodged such a fate.

In their place will be a series of lower-budget original and auteur-driven films trying to find an audience, including Warner Bros.’ “Mickey 17,” director Bong Joon-ho’s follow-up to his historic Best Picture winner “Parasite.” Robert De Niro will also star in the WB crime film “Alto Knights,” while “The Boys” star Jack Quaid tries out being an action lead playing a banker who can’t feel pain in Paramount’s “Novocaine.”

A very hot summer

This will lead into a second and third quarter where the glass could be overflowing. Ryan Coogler highlights April with the original Michael B. Jordan horror film “Sinners,” leading into a summer that includes the Marvel film “Thunderbolts*,” remakes of Disney’s “Lilo & Stitch” and DreamWorks’ “How to Train Your Dragon,” Pixar’s “Elio,” the horror threequel “28 Years Later” and Tom Cruise’s potential adieu to Ethan Hunt in “Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning.”

Then in July is the big one: “Superman.” The film carries very high stakes for Warner Bros. as it will determine whether the studio has a potential king franchise with James Gunn’s DC Studios. So far, things are looking up for the Son of Krypton, as the teaser trailer earned a Warner Bros. record 250 million views in its first 24 hours, a sign of widespread interest even with major head-to-head competition like “Jurassic World: Rebirth” and Marvel’s “Fantastic Four: The First Steps” also hitting screens in July.

A big finish

After the summer, the big bucks should keep rolling in. September likely will bring a relative slowdown with demographic-specific titles like “The Conjuring: Last Rites,” “Saw XI” and “Downton Abbey 3” on the slate. But that will change in a big way in October with “Michael,” a biopic that Lionsgate hopes will reverse its fortunes after a terrible 2024 at the box office and which could challenge “Oppenheimer” for the highest-grossing biopic of all time.

That will lead into a final two months that should be just as big as the one theaters just enjoyed with the return of Elphaba and Glinda in Universal’s “Wicked: For Good,” followed by the Thanksgiving release of Disney’s “Zootopia 2.” Paramount, which provided young men with an alternative in 2024 with “Gladiator II,” will do so again with Glen Powell’s take on Stephen King’s “The Running Man,” which will likely be produced at a lower budget than the Ridley Scott legacyquel.

Closing out the year will be James Cameron’s “Avatar: Fire and Ash,” a sequel to the 2022 film “Avatar: The Way of Water,” which grossed $2.32 billion. While this third installment won’t have the advantage of a 13-year wait to build up hype, it is clear that moviegoers around the world are excited for more adventures in Pandora and will likely turn up en masse once again.

What could derail a big 2025?

The fact that many major titles are coming out in close proximity to each other is why theater owners feel like the rebound they’ve enjoyed in the second half of 2024 is just the beginning. But there is one thing that could crush all their hopes: another pandemic.

In recent months, health officials have warned about the spread of the H5N1 virus, also known as the “bird flu,” among cows across the United States and Canada. Dozens of cases have been reported in humans, but so far the virus has yet to mutate in a way that would make it highly contagious and transmittable among humans.

Still, epidemiologists have warned that the more the virus spreads among livestock unchecked, the greater the risk for farmers in proximity to those animals; and the more humans that get infected from those animals, the greater the chance of a dangerous mutation occurring and triggering another pandemic that could close theaters again.

When asked by TheWrap about his concerns over the bird flu, one theater owner said that he was aware and concerned about the virus, but couldn’t dwell on it.

“I mean, what can any of us in this industry do?” he said. “If it does happen, at least we have the social distancing and disinfecting protocols from COVID ready to go, but whether or not it gets bad enough that we have to close is out of our hands. But yeah, it would be beyond frustrating if it ever gets to that.”

For now, exhibitors are focusing on what they can control: improving moviegoer experience and auditorium quality, working with studios to market films directly to their loyalty members and taking advantage of the growing release slate to build momentum.

“At CinemaCon, [AMC CEO] Adam Aron was asked in a panel if the movie theater industry can survive being a $9 billion industry. After this year, we won’t have to worry about that question,” Loria said. “Now the active question is who can survive in a $10 billion industry, and can Hollywood and exhibitors keep the pie growing in the years to come to allow the business at large to remain sustainable?”

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