After a rollercoaster year in 2024, the theatrical market was looking to return to something like normal in 2025. The wildfires in Los Angeles in January have already shown that we need to expect the unexpected. While everything is on hold right now, we don’t expect the natural disaster to have significant impact on the planned release schedule for major movies, and, although it will put a dent in moviegoing in Southern California for a while, we haven’t seen enough evidence of knock-on effects to reduce our prediction for the year. We launched that prediction in the November edition of The Numbers Business Report, and we’re sharing it publicly for the first time today.
The next update to the prediction will be released next week in the January edition of the Report. Subscribe to The Numbers Business Report for that update and a full set of predictions for films planned for release this year. Read on for an overview of how our model thought 2025 will shape up in movie theaters, as of the end of November…
The prediction comes in three parts. First, and in some ways the easiest part of the equation, are predictions for how much will be made by each movie currently scheduled for wide release next year. Second, we predict how much will be made by limited and specialty releases during the year. Finally, we address the “unknown unknowns” by predicting how much will be earned by movies that haven’t been put on the schedule yet, and not earned by movies that will be taken off the schedule or eventually moved to 2026. Needless to say, this is the most speculative part of the prediction, but vital to getting a figure that’s likely to be close to the final outcome. Adding these three groups together gives us our prediction for the year.
As of now, the model expects eleven films will top $200 million at the box office in 2025, compared to eight in 2024, and eight in 2023. Avatar: Fire and Ash is expected to earn the most in total, but nearly half of its expected box office will likely come in 2026 and the chart above just shows 2025 earnings. The top-earning film during the year is expected to be Jurassic World Rebirth, which has a prime release date and comes from one of the most successful franchises in history.
Of course, some of the films above will over-perform their prediction, and some will under-perform. Since the prediction lies in the middle of the extremes, our model currently doesn’t have any films earning over $500 million at the box office. That’s unlikely to be the case in reality, and one of the films listed above will almost certainly hit that figure. We just don’t know which one yet.
Between them, the 94 currently-dated films are expected to earn about $7.747 billion during 2025, according to the model. That compares to $6.307 billion for the 71 then-dated films when we made our 2024 prediction this time last year.
The second element in our prediction model is the performance of specialty and limited releases—any film that never plays in more than 1,000 theaters simultaneously during its theatrical run. That’s a segment of the market that has traditionally been dominated by independent films, and represented about 3%–5% of the overall market.
The model assumes that next year will be similar to the last two years, and predicts $254 million will come from limited releases in 2025, up very slightly from this year’s $241 million, and higher than the $221 million earned in 2023. The range of uncertainty in this prediction is quite high in percentage terms—it wouldn’t be a surprise for the actual number to be 20% higher or lower than the prediction—but that won’t have a huge influence on the final number for the year.
The final piece of the puzzle in predicting next year at the box office is the films we currently don’t know about. Or, more precisely, that we don’t know will be released in 2025. In November 2023, 77 films had wide release dates announced for 2024. 11 of them were subsequently canceled, moved to a limited release, or re-dated outside of this year, leaving 66 films that had announced dates in 2024 and were actually released in 2024. Over the course of the year, 76 new wide releases were announced.
Assessing with any certainty how everything will play out in 2025 is, frankly, just about impossible. Our final assessment in November was that unannounced releases would add a net $832 million to the total for the year (see The Numbers Business Report for the details on how we derived that figure).
Putting everything together gives us our prediction for 2025 as a whole: $9.3 billion. If we hit that number, we will have the best year in theaters since 2019, and exceed the performance of 2024 by about 6%.
The main takeaway from our analysis right now is cautious optimism for the theatrical business. We don’t predict a return to $10 billion in box office in 2025 right now, but that figure is within reach. As usual, we need more films, but a return to form for the Marvel franchise, and big numbers from Jurassic World and Avatar, would help close that gap. If distributors like Amazon MGM Studios, Lionsgate, A24, and Neon have good years, and upstarts like Angel Studios and MUBI can find some hits, finding another $700 million (less than $60 million a month), and hitting $10 billion can be done. That looked like a distant prospect this time last year.
As usual, we’ll be updating the prediction each month in The Numbers Business Report, and reporting soon after here on The Numbers.
For more details on what’s driving the market, predictions for all movies through the end of 2025, and more, subscribe to our full report.
– Current release schedule
– Recent release schedule changes
– Subscribe to the Business Report for full details on our market predictions
Bruce Nash, bruce.nash@the-numbers.com