Studios are betting on 2025 by sacrificing 2024’s blockbusters

Movie theaters, and the studios that provide their content, have been clawing their way out of a financial crater ever since the COVID-19 pandemic began. After Avengers: Endgame, the live-action Lion King, and Todd Phillips’ Joker helped fuel record-breaking box-office returns in 2019, the pandemic-era lockdowns froze theaters in their tracks, and the subsequent thaw has been slow and difficult for every industry that touches cinema.

An impressive 2023 box-office take, led by Barbenheimer, the Mario brothers, Miles Morales, and more, doesn’t necessarily mean movie theaters are on sustainable financial footing at this point. But it is a hopeful sign that they’re returning to full strength, with some room to grow. There’s more hope on the horizon, too: Projections from movie theater analyst Eric Wold indicate that box-office numbers will finally return to almost 2019 levels in 2025. For better or worse, movie studios are greeting those projections by saving many of their intended blockbusters for next year.

The hope for a strong 2025 was repeated over and over again like a mantra at this year’s CinemaCon, the annual Las Vegas conference that gathers studios, theater owners, and theatrical technology companies to discuss the state of moviegoing and preview the studios’ offerings for the next couple of years. Everyone from studio executives to theater owners with just one screen to program were touting the return of theaters with hope and some quiet trepidation — for good reason in both cases.

Despite the box office’s continual rise over the last few years, the post-quarantine era has still been tremendously difficult for movie theaters. And while 2024 profits are projected to exceed 2023’s, the gains are still likely to be more gradual than anyone hoped, both because of slow economic growth overall, and because of Hollywood’s Writers Guild and Screen Actors Guild strikes last year. Even with the theatrical business recovering, the margins are still pretty delicate. Getting box-office returns back to pre-COVID levels would offer everyone in the business a sigh of relief and a moment to look forward to the future.

But reality doesn’t always match economic projections. For the box office to actually hit its prognosticated marks, theater owners need a whole lot of exciting movies to screen, a note studios have really taken to heart, if the already packed 2025 calendar is any indication.

The hope for 2025’s box-office recovery has become a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Here’s the argument: If more people will see movies in 2025, it stands to reason that studios would want to release their biggest movies then, instead of in 2024. At the same time, people go to theaters to see movies they’re excited about, so a schedule of new blockbusters and exciting movies from every studio week after week should fan the flames. Those two simple points form a perfect logical circle that seems on track to give us one of the most stacked blockbuster lineups in years. The only real loser is 2024’s movie slate.

While there are some surefire hits this year, like Dune: Part Two, Godzilla x Kong: A New Empire, and Moana 2, this year’s blockbuster lineup is largely a list of also-rans. Three of the biggest movies are from Sony’s Spider-Man spinoff series rather than a slate of Marvel or DC blockbusters. Several of the intended hits have already fallen flat. The best bets on the 2024 calendar seem to be the slew of animated movies that will hopefully keep the rest of the box office afloat, along with a few likely hits, like Deadpool & Wolverine or Joker: Folie à Deux, and some small- and mid-budget standouts, like Civil War and Bob Marley: One Love, which are breaking through to audiences due to fewer blockbusters crowding the theaters.

Comparing this year’s lineup to 2025, though, we immediately start to see a very different picture, and an embarrassment of riches on the horizon. Next year includes everything from highly anticipated comic book movies like Marvel’s Fantastic Four refresh and James Gunn’s full DC reboot to a John Wick spinoff, a new Mission: Impossible movie, a new entry in the Fast & Furious franchise, a new Jurassic World movie, and even the next movie in James Cameron’s Avatar series. Those franchise installments will stand alongside new projects from big-name directors like Bong Joon-ho, Paul Thomas Anderson, and Ryan Coogler. And that’s just what’s been announced so far.

With all due respect to Sonic and Mufasa, who both have new movies coming out at the end of 2024, it’s tough to compete with a year that includes an Avatar sequel. 2024’s lack of massive standouts may hurt the year’s box office, but as CinemaCon 2024’s unofficial mantra suggested, that’s all right, because 2025 is coming to set things right! Looking at the planned lineup, that analysis really might measure up. 2024 is going to continue to be a good year to go to the movies, but not a great one. For that, you’ll have to wait until 2025, the year movies finally come back — hopefully.

Not all of this is something Hollywood did by choice. While Marvel certainly took a conscious step back from its normally packed release calendar in 2024, movies including Avatar 3 and Mission: Impossible 8 got bumped because of delays during the WGA and SAG strikes in 2023. There are likely even a few movies on 2025’s packed schedule that will get shifted to 2026 for one reason or another — in fact, Matt Reeves’ The Batman 2 already has been. Even still, it’s more intriguing-sounding blockbusters than we’d normally see on a single year’s roster.

Releasing all these movies at once is only half the battle for Hollywood. The movies have to be good to make it past opening weekend in theaters, and even if they are good, there’s no guarantee they’ll all find traction in such a competitive market.

In the pre-pandemic blockbuster era, the biggest movies would live and die by their opening-weekend gross, raking in hundreds of millions of dollars in their first few days, which would often indicate how well the movie would continue to do in the following weeks. However, in the last couple of years, some of the biggest hits, like Elemental, Sound of Freedom, Five Nights at Freddy’s, Anyone but You, and even Barbie and Oppenheimer, had fairly quiet openings compared to their final box-office totals, thanks in large part to positive word of mouth and multiple repeat viewings.

What this means for studios is that it may be advantageous to keep blockbusters in theaters longer, giving them more time to find viewers. Audiences didn’t stop going to the Mario movie simply because Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 came out. They went to both — and that’s not to mention the dual success of Barbenheimer. It may be harder to hang on to theatrical slots for months on end in 2025, though, with such a packed schedule.

But the density of major releases in 2025 reflects a concern theater owners reiterated at CinemaCon too: They’d rather have a calendar that includes 52 weeks of quality movie releases than have a few massive blockbusters all year long, with largely deserted gaps in between. They want to offer their paying customers something new and interesting every single week.

Studios have typically shied away from keeping their own movies in theaters for long periods, which can put their own tentpole releases into competition with each other and with the biggest releases from other studios. But with 2025 packed to the gills with movies, it seems like studios may have decided to lean into the chaos and accept a little friendly rivalry between the biggest entrants on the calendar. Getting audiences back into theaters is what matters, no matter what they’re seeing.