2025 Box Office Report: Hits and Misses

How has the box office fared so far in 2025? As the year hits its halfway point, Hollywood has fielded blockbusters like “Lilo & Stitch” and “Sinners,” as well as some expensive blunders with the likes of “Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning,” “Captain America: Brave New World” and “Elio” on course to be painful money losers.

The good news is there’s been a better mix of broadly appealing tentpoles (“A Minecraft Movie”), kid friendly fare (“How to Train Your Dragon”) and critically acclaimed movies for older crowds (“The Phoenician Scheme”). As a result, ticket sales are up 18% from 2024, according to Comscore. But the movie business has yet to regain its pre-COVID form, with the box office down 26% from 2019, when a pandemic just seemed like a dystopian idea from a Steven Soderbergh movie.

There’s still plenty of promise on the horizon, from “Superman” to “Wicked: For Good” to “Avatar: Fire and Ash,” which should keep multiplexes packed in the coming months. But with six months of grosses in the can, here’s a look at what soared, struggled and fell flat at the box office.

Good

Lilo & Stitch
Global box office: $910 million
Budget: $100 million

Stitch, welcome to the A-list. Turns out, 23 years was the perfect amount of time for the rowdy blue alien creature to become a lightning rod of nostalgia for millennials, who turned out in force alongside family crowds. Initially planned as a straight-to-streaming release, the live-action remake of 2002’s animated comedy is on pace to become the year’s first billion-dollar blockbuster. And that’s just the theatrical windfall. Stitch-themed merchandise has been all the rage long before he and Lilo returned to the big screen. In 2024, Disney sold $2.6 billion in consumer products featuring the “Lilo & Stitch” characters. Now that he’s the biggest star of the summer, expect that figure to skyrocket when Christmas and Hanukkah roll around. That’s a lot of Stitch mayhem!

Sinners
Global box office: $363.8 million
Budget: $90 million

With “Sinners,” an ambitious, R-rated slice of Southern Gothic, director Ryan Coogler defied the odds to prove that audiences can get excited about something unique. Word-of-mouth for the Warner Bros. film was so strong that “Sinners” earned nearly as much in its second weekend as in its first, an unprecedented result for a film that didn’t open over the holiday season. It helped that “Sinners” received some of the year’s best reviews. And Michael B. Jordan, who starred in the film as twin bootleggers who open a juke joint in the Mississippi Delta, demonstrated once again that he’s the rare box office draw. At a time when studios have become congenitally risk averse, “Sinners” validates that sometimes it pays to take chances.

A Minecraft Movie
Global box office: $954.4 million
Budget: $150 million

It took more than a decade to bring this video game adaptation to the screen, during which Warner Bros. and Legendary shuffled through directors and concepts. Well, it was worth the wait. Thanks to its family friendly approach and the presence of stars like Jason Momoa and Jack Black, “A Minecraft Movie” grossed more than $950 million. And credit director Jared Hess (“Napoleon Dynamite”) with finding a comic tone that helped the movie appeal to more than just video game buffs. The smash hit arrived at a welcome time for Warner Bros. film chiefs Michael De Luca and Pam Abdy, whose jobs seemed to be on the line until “A Minecraft Movie” and “Sinners” silenced their doubters. But there’s more at play here. “A Minecraft Movie” is part of a wave of PG-rated, all-ages blockbusters that are rivaling comic book movies in popularity.

According to the source: Variety.