The first sign came in late April, hinting that Hollywood might be in for a summer of what entertainment-industry trade papers once upon a time called “boffo box office.” Over a weekend that’s normally a dead zone on the film calendar, a grab bag of titles unexpectedly packed in audiences: Ryan Coogler’s controversial blues vampire thriller Sinners (in its second week of wide release), Ben Affleck’s middling mid-budget action flick The Accountant 2, a reissue of Star Wars: Episode III — Revenge of the Sith, and the chicken-jockey juggernaut A Minecraft Movie in its fourth weekend in theaters. Each took in more than $20 million over the April 25 to 27 corridor, bringing the year’s domestic box-office tally up a vigorous 117 percent over the same period in 2024. Since the start of the year, no more than two movies had crested that $20 million hump with the vast majority scarcely managing to crack eight figures. Sinners’ and Minecraft’s “strong holds” — industry parlance for a film’s continuing ability to keep putting butts in seats weeks after its debut — also came as a positive sign. Altogether, the strength of ticket sales for such a chaotic jumble of movies indicated a return from the brink after a cascading series of showbiz calamities stretching from the N95 era to the Hollywood strikes to the Los Angeles wildfires. After years of creeping multiplex apathy, people were getting back into the habit of going to the movies.
Almost exactly a year ago, the $168 million Mad Max spinoff Furiosa hit theaters along with Sony’s meh The Garfield Movie to deliver the lowest-grossing Memorial Day weekend in nearly three decades. But what a difference 365 days can make. According to box-office analysts, this year’s Memorial Day frame — featuring a theatrical showdown between Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning and Disney’s non-animated, “live-action” iteration of Lilo & Stitch — is poised to break attendance records. Not only that, the movies hitting screens during the 17 or so weeks of summer have a strong chance to pull in a cumulative $4 billion worldwide. On the strength of a disparate and larger than normal slew of anticipated sequels (M3GAN 2.0, Jurassic World Rebirth, Nobody 2, 28 Years Later), heritage IP (Karate Kid: Legends, DC Studios chief James Gunn’s Superman, The Fantastic Four: First Steps), works by prestige directors (Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme, Darren Aronofsky’s Caught Stealing, newly anointed final-cut filmmaker Zach Cregger’s Weapons), and a few wild cards (F1, Bring Her Back, Ari Aster’s Eddington), such an outcome would represent a reversion to a pre-pandemic mode of moviegoing that many had written off as financially extinct and culturally passé.
“Simplistically speaking, more movies means more money,” says Scott Mendelson, the box-office columnist for Puck News who also provides Hollywood analysis on The Outside Scoop. “Even though not every tent pole is going to sail to infinity and beyond, the more movies you’ve got, the more likely you’re going to have a lot of legs.” Moreover, thanks to the sheer volume and rapid-fire cadence of potential hits, Comscore senior media analyst Paul Dergarabedian characterizes this summer’s cinematic offerings as an embarrassment of riches: “Unlike last year, which was completely discombobulated by the strike and the resultant disruptions, this is a kick-ass summer. I think we’re definitely headed for $4 billion. The only issue might be that there are too many good films. It’s going to be like a box-office traffic jam!”
After the groggy start to last year’s hottest movie season, the box office gained momentum owing to two cinematic grand slams — Deadpool & Wolverine (which took in $1.3 billion worldwide to become the top-grossing R-rated movie ever) and Inside Out 2 ($1.69 billion, snapping the erstwhile “Pixar slump”) — en route to a $3.63 billion cumulative gross for everything in release. This summer, by contrast, doesn’t have a single clear contender for biggest blockbuster; instead, it offers a deeper bench of commercial titles that could score consistent triples if not home runs. “It feels and looks more spread out,” says Shawn Robbins, Fandango’s director of analytics and founder of Box Office Theory. “You not only have something original like Sinners holding well and then a couple of Marvel films, but there’s something like the John Wick spinoff Ballerina, the live-action How to Train Your Dragon, 28 Years Later — which I’m really bullish on in terms of the horror genre — Jurassic, Superman, and then Weapons in August. Not all of them will hit the high end of expectations, but so many have that potential to meet or exceed expectations.”
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With the understanding of 2023’s $4.039 billion-grossing summer as a kind of once-in-a-generation fluke — with $2.375 billion of that total coming from Barbenheimer alone — you would have to rewind back to before the onset of COVID to the run of back-to-back-to-back $4 billion summers in the late 2010s for audience levels comparable to what Mendelson calls “going to the movies just to go to the movies.” Whereas 2019 (cumulative box-office total: $4.32 billion) saw the release of overperformers including The Lion King, Toy Story 4, Spider-Man: Far From Home, and Avengers: Endgame — the much-asterisked either top-grossing or second-highest-grossing movie of all time — Mendelson feels 2017 may be a more valuable comparison point because it “felt more like a spread-the-wealth kind of year” with a range of titles achieving blockbusterdom, including Wonder Woman, Despicable Me 3, and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2. All of which is not to say summer 2025 has all the genre and demographic bases covered. “To be fair, there are still not enough live-action comedy movies; there are still not a lot of mid-budget movies aimed at women,” Mendelson points out.
It also isn’t the case that every big movie reaching the inside of an auditorium this summer is predestined to strike gold. Reportedly carrying a nearly $400 million production budget and arriving as one of the most expensive movies ever made, Mission: Impossible 8 will have its work cut out for it in turning a profit. “If you look historically at the Mission films, they’ve never opened to more than $100 million; they’ve never turned a billion,” Dergarabedian says. Likewise, the Joseph Kosinski–directed, Brad Pitt–starring race-car action-drama F1 — dubbed “Top Gun on a racetrack” by film-writing wags — upshifts into the cineplex with significant question marks. Previous motorsport thrillers such as 2013’s Rush and Ford v Ferrari didn’t exactly burn rubber at the ticket-taking turnstile. And this one comes with a mega budget bankrolled by Apple Original Films (with a theatrical-distribution arrangement through Warner Bros.), which has seen low box-office returns for many of its offerings, including Argylle, Killers of the Flower Moon, and Wolfs. If it fails, F1 could be the tech behemoth–cum–studio’s final coffin nail for wide theatrical releases. “There’s very little chance of it recouping its $300 million production budget,” says Mendelson.
Box-office analysts canvassed by Vulture generally agree three films are all but destined to reach the winners’ circle this summer. Our guys predict Lilo & Stitch and Superman will vie to be the top-grossing domestic movie. (Robbins, for his part, is Team Man of Steel. “The ingredients are in place,” he says. “Warner Bros. has been on a roll, James Gunn where he is in his career, where superhero movies are now, how selective audiences have become about them, and this particular Superman essentially being a total restart — it has really positive energy. We could be in for a special run from that movie.”) While internationally, Jurassic World Rebirth — the latest installment after 2023’s Jurassic World: Dominion, the $6 billion franchise’s “final” chapter — will likely be the title to beat.
But in an era of economic uncertainty — as President Trump’s whipsawing tariff policies buffet the stock market and economists push the panic button, placing the risk level for slipping into a global recession this year at high — factors above and beyond what Hollywood has on offer will also likely dictate this summer’s ticket-buying patterns. For all its foibles, moviegoing remains one of the most economical forms of entertainment available outside the home: way cheaper than live sporting events and concerts. More crucially, during the past eight recessions, box-office tallies increased six times over. “There is so much tumult going on in the world right now,” Dergarabedian notes. “We’re seeing so many memes at the movie theater, posting on social media from the movie theater. The movie theater is becoming this hub of influence. This could be the summer that really reinforces the idea that going to the movies is the great escape. And there’s really nothing like it.”
