Amph The 2025 Box Office Blood Galaxy

Time to anticipate rocking in a new year!

The Blood Bath began in 2015...
The rain of the Bloodshower poured through 2016...
With the Bloodsplatter staining 2017...
And washed away by the Blood Ocean in 2018....
To consume the Blood World in 2019...
A world that, in 2020, found itself orbited by the dreaded Blood Moon...
...but then the Blood Moon got sick and was forced into the Blood Quarantine...
Then, the battle to save the theater industry began with the Blood Vaccine in 2021...
And its battle continued through the Blood Booster of 2022...
A resuscitation of an industry necessitating the use of the 2023 Blood Bag...which then took form as the 2023 Blood Barbie...
But with an industry in need of new blood, they ordered forth the 2024 Blood Replenishment...
And, yet, even now an ancient prophecy calls forth cinematic performance of an even greater scale through the 2025 Box Office Blood Galaxy!!!



Some Notable Releases:
Jan: The Damned, Den of Thieves 2: Pantera, Wolf Man, Better Man [wide release], Flight Risk, Dog Man
Feb: Heart Eyes, Love Hurts, Captain America: Brave New World, Paddington in Peru, The Monkey, The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie, Last Breath, The Legend of Ochi
Mar: Mickey 17, In the Lost Lands, Black Bag, Novocaine, The Alto Knights, Snow White, A Working Man
Apr: A Minecraft Movie, The Amateur, The Ritual, Sinners, The Accountant 2, Until Dawn
May: Thunderbolts*, Final Destination: Bloodlines, Lilo & Stitch, Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning, Karate Kid: Legends
Jun: From the World of John Wick: Ballerina, Pixar's Elio, How to Train Your Dragon, 28 Years Later, F1, M3GAN 2.0
Jul: Jurassic World: Rebirth, Superman, I Know What You Did Last Summer, The Smurfs Movie, The Fantastic Four: First Steps
Aug: The Bad Guys 2, The Naked Gun, Beneath the Storm, (The Battle of Baktan Cross), Freakier Friday, Mercy, Nobody 2, Thread: An Insidious Tale
Sept: The Conjuring: Last Rites, Downton Abbey 3, The Bride, Saw XI
Oct: Michael, Roofman, Animal Friends, Tron: Ares, The Black Phone 2, Good Fortune, Mortal Kombat 2
Nov: Burgonia, Predator: Badlands, The Running Man, Now You See Me 3, Wicked: For Good, Zootopia 2
Dec: Five Night at Freddy's 2, The SpongeBob Movie: Search For SquarePants, Avatar: Fire and Ash, The Anaconda, The Housemaid, Marty Supreme


Looking at the year as a whole, it's a pretty packed line-up (and not just compared to last year's thin schedule). Though that is at least partially due to all the strike-delayed releases from last year delayed into this year. I am surprised at some of the risks being taken by surprise hits in moving their sequels to different release slots/seasons. M3GAN from the first film's Feb to June, and I don't know what the hell FNAF2 is doing in Dec.

It's also interesting to see the Insidious, Conjuring and Saw franchises all hitting within a month of each other (and outside of the more traditional Oct horror window or a bigger summer window- albeit Saw X did well enough in Sept last time). I'm also surprised that I Know What You Did Last Summer is getting such a summer slot- even Scream really doesn't do that and IKWYDLS was always second tier to that, let alone more recent horror franchise successes.

And we're obviously seeing other films give Avatar a wide enough berth, so Nov is looking a little more crowded than usual too. We also have a film by the director of Tron Legacy (F1) coming out the same year as the sequel to Tron Legacy (finally) comes out.

My earlier bets for Top 10: Avatar 3, Wicked 2, Zootopia 2, Thunderbolts, JW4, F4FS, Superman, MI8, Cap 4, Passion 2 (basically all the ones that need to do at least $500-600m minimum)

Surprise spoilers could be: Lilo & Stitch, F1, Minecraft, Elio, Ballerina, Sinners, and Tron 3, though I suspect most, if not all, of those will simply remain in the Top 20.

Really, though, what we are going to find out is if people actually give a crap about the Fantastic Four, or if it really was just Fox's execution of the property that held it back...

 

Yeah, I don't have any hopes for Snow White doing well at all. I'm probably underestimating HTDYD's nostalgic appeal, since it was never a big thing for me (and I don't think I ever saw the sequel which is generally raved about). So that one could surprise me. I think Lilo & Stitch is something that can translate very well to live action, and the marketing teasers have been short but really fun and effective, IMO. So my money is on that one for now.

I think Gunn will manage to deliver something that will elevate Superman above conservative expectations- but it is an uphill battle for anything DC with audiences at this point. However, i think they'll overcome that (continuing to lean on the GOTG pedigree in the marketing for general audiences will no doubt help). Plus it has a dog. That's an extra $50m minimum.

MI8 may fair better this time than 7 since it won't be fighting for IMAX screens with Nolan. Thunderbolts will surprise people, I think. Audiences have been wanting more grounded material from Marvel, and less cosmic. And this being the Avengers-equivalent of bringing together characters into a team to top off the last few years of films/shows will give it some juice (especially since most of them are well-regarded characters by audiences even when they're from lesser-received films). It's really more dependent on how well Cap 4 is received, since that will do more than anything else in building audience interest and hype for the next MCU film.

Sinners may end up as you say, but I suspect it's going to find its audience and make some moderate bank off of the names attached, Coogler isn't up there just yet, but he could get there. And this film may be a key step towards that.

 

I think there's an added layer of needing continual marketing in the current mediascape because it's too easy to get buried by all the options and not breakthrough. I've lost count of large releases that either underperformed or even merely opened decently where so many people would mention that they hadn't even heard of the movie or seen a trailer- despite these films having their trailers play in front of almost every movie for months before release.

And that becomes a problem when you have a weak release slate- the wider audiences aren't going to the theaters during those lulls and, thus, are not seeing those trailers when they are being shown constantly. Then those films come out and underperform because of that lowered awareness.

But then what we saw in 2024 was that once bigger films started to come out (even if they were underperforming themselves), it slowly built up some momentum via the trailers playing with them so that the next batch of releases actually had awareness to build off of. That seems to be the main reason (quality of the other films aside) explaining the absolutely weird performance pattern we saw throughout May and early June before kids were out of school, etc.

You are severely overestimating what a 28xL film can open to. Let alone in January. A2, at that weekend point in its run, grossed more than either 28xL opening weekend (both films did $10m or less on their opening weekends in pre-July 4th and mid-may release windows). If this had come out 10+ years ago at the height of the TWD-fueled zombie craze, it might have had a chance of doing significantly more. But now? It'll a small, inflation-fueled percentile increase at best. 28YL1 will have to lay some notable goodwill and groundwork to boost 28TL2 that much.

 

Yeah, even for those of us more geared towards the blockbusters, there have been some truly great mid-level-or-below films over the past couple years alone. In 2022 we were being ridiculously spoiled between films like Everything Everywhere All At Once, The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, Glass Onion, Nope, Emily the Criminal, Tar, The Menu, Violent Night, and even some notably weird (IMO) misfires like Barbarian and Three Thousand Years of Longing.

And then 2023 probably had one of the strongest, most evenly balanced slate of Oscar contenders that we've had in years (and they didn't even nominate Godzilla Minus One for the top award).

This year, maybe a little less so (thin release slate due to the strikes and what have you), but the award contenders are only just starting to make their presence known. Though the first half of the year did have Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, which I found to be underrated. Not every year will be full of bangers like 2022.

 

The two films that I'm looking forward to the most next year, Mission Impossible 8 and F1, are probably two of the biggest **** or go home in terms of box office. If only for their monster budgets. They could both do well but they need to do incredibly well to even make it into the black.