Where Is the Box Office Headed in 2025?
By Movieguide® Contributor
After 2024’s box office overperformed its beginning-of-the-year estimates, 2025 has an even brighter future as it looks to be the first normal year since the pandemic.
2022 was the first year the box office began to rebound, though the pandemic still had a large effect, with its final gross at $7.4 billion. 2023 marked another comeback year, but the dual writers’ and actors’ strikes limited it to a gross of roughly $9 billion. The fallout from the strikes continued into 2024 which is also estimated to have a final total around $9 billion, roughly $300 million more than was anticipated at the start of the year.
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With the pandemic long in the rearview and the dual strikes now firmly in the past, the upcoming year is set to be the first one since 2019 without any major hiccups. The landscape of the entertainment industry, however, has changed. Many consumers now prefer to wait until movies come to streaming so they can watch from the comfort of their homes. This has left movie theaters floundering, earning billions less than before the pandemic.
From 2009 to 2019, the annual box office gross never dipped below $10 billion. For 2025, the box office is projected to gross somewhere between $9 and $10 billion, though its closeness to pre-pandemic numbers is largely impacted by inflation as theaters will sell hundreds of millions fewer tickets.
Nonetheless, 2025 has much to be excited for as dozens of highly anticipated movies are coming to theaters. These movies include CAPTAIN AMERICA: BRAVE NEW WORLD (2/14), A MINECRAFT MOVIE (4/4), THUNDERBOLTS (5/5), MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – THE FINAL RECKONING (5/23), ELIO (6/13), HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON (live-action) (6/13), JURASSIC WORLD: REBIRTH (7/2), SUPERMAN (7/11), FANTASTIC FOUR: THE FIRST STEPS (11/25), FREAKIER FRIDAY (8/8), TRON: ARES (10/10), WICKED: FOR GOOD (111/21), ZOOTOPIA 2 (11/26) and AVATAR: FIRE AND ASH (12/19).
Thankfully many of these movies are family-friendly which bolsters their odds of success.
Movieguide®’s 2023 Report to the Entertainment Industry found that, of the Top 25 movies at the domestic box office, those with very strong Christian, redemptive worldviews averaged $178,156,715, 100% better than those with very strong Romantic, occult, pagan, humanist or false religious worldviews.
Beyond the worldviews, movies that avoid foul language earned the most money ($257.16 million) on average. With increased obscenities and profanities, the box office earnings steadily declined.
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