Tom Cruise, Superman and 'Avatar' hold keys to 2025 box office
Tom Cruise takes on what may be his final "Mission: Impossible," a new Superman will wear the red cape, and the record-setting "Avatar" sci-fi series will return to movie theatres this year.
Those films and more are giving cinema operators hope that the long recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic will continue in 2025. Five years after the start of the health crisis, moviegoing has not fully rebounded.
Box office receipts totalled $8.6 billion last year in the United States and Canada, 25 per cent below the pre-pandemic heights of $11.4 billion in 2019.
The film industry was disrupted again in 2023 when Hollywood writers and actors went on strike.
"That complex matrix of filmmaking, where everyone wants the best talent and the best actors and the best sets, it takes a long time to get that running again," said Tim Richards, founder and CEO of Europe's Vue Cinemas. "2025 is going to feel the tail end of that."
Top names in the movie business will gather at the annual CinemaCon convention in Las Vegas early next month to talk about the state of the industry.
The conference draws executives from Hollywood studios and multiplex operators such as AMC Entertainment, Cinemark and Cineworld as well as owners of single theatres in small towns.
At the Academy Awards this month, Anora filmmaker and best director winner Sean Baker delivered a "battle cry" for filmmakers, distributors and audiences to support theatres. "The theatre-going experience is under threat," he said, noting that the number of screens shrunk during the pandemic. "If we don't reverse this trend, we'll be losing a vital part of our culture."
Shawn Robbins, Director of Movie Analytics at Fandango and founder and owner of Box Office Theory, said the movie business was adjusting to "a new normal".
"Event movies are increasingly drivers of the business," he said. "There's even more weight on their shoulders in terms of box office dollars."
Moviegoers still turn out for big-budget films, Robbins said, but have shown they are happy to wait to watch others at home. "It is very common knowledge that a lot of movies will be available to stream within three to eight weeks, whereas it used to be a minimum of three months," he said.
'Avatar' as tipping point?
Among the big hitters coming to theatres this year are Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning, a movie that may be Cruise's last appearance in the long-running action franchise. "One last time," he says in the trailer. The film will debut over the US Memorial Day weekend in May, along with Walt Disney's live-action version of animated classic Lilo & Stitch.
Brad Pitt plays a Formula 1 driver in the June release F1, and in July, Warner Bros will release its new "Superman" movie directed by Guardians of the Galaxy filmmaker James Gunn and starring David Corenswet.
From Marvel, the anti-hero team Thunderbolts will kick off the summer moviegoing season in early May, followed by The Fantastic Four in late July.
Around the November and December holidays, offerings include the second part of musical box office phenomenon Wicked, animated sequel Zootopia 2 and Avatar: Fire and Ash, the third film in James Cameron's "Avatar" series. The first "Avatar" is the highest-grossing movie of all time, and the second movie ranks third.
Robbins projected 2025 would end with a slight increase in domestic box office receipts compared with last year, "maybe flirting with $9 billion". He said it is unclear when ticket sales will return to pre-pandemic levels.
Richards said he believed the new "Avatar" would kick off "an extraordinary three to five years" for cinemas.
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The problem was that information technology was always something intellectual where you had to explain the mechanics of the threat. It wasn't emotional. Come 2019, we had finished 'Fallout." We were making 'Top Gun: Maverick,' and I said to Tom, 'The audience is ready for technology to be the villain, not just the threat.' The opening of 'Final Reckoning' features a sort of greatest-hits montage from the series. What was the calculus in bringing those past clips in and balancing it with the current story? You want it to feel fluid. There's always the struggle, the balance of how much exposition is too much and how much is not enough. And I think we found a nice balance. But look, I would love to make the movie with no dialogue at all. If you go back and watch 'Rogue Nation,' 'Fallout' and 'Dead Reckoning,' you can watch them with just the score. And you can watch it as a silent movie when you watch the mission brief in 'Fallout': 'Good evening, Mr. Hunt.' It's so much more compelling without dialogue. There have been criticisms about the amount of exposition in 'Final Reckoning.' Does that faze you? Everything we do, we're doing for the audience — all the information that we're shooting, all the exposition, all the flashbacks, everything is there to absolve them of the burden of having to concentrate on the movie. We don't want it to be work. We want it to be an experience. Then there are people who don't care how much time and effort and work you put into it. They're just going, 'I don't need that.' That's the push and pull of these movies. We always want them to start faster. We always want them to be shorter. We always want less dialogue, because they're global movies and billions of people all over the world are reading this movie rather than just listening to it. You have said that you're working on something with Tom and your 'Final Reckoning' co-writer that is 'gnarlier' than "Mission.' What can you say about that? It's gnarly! Tom has fewer than 500 words in the entire movie. His co-star has fewer words than that. I think between the two of them, they have about 750 words. It stems from my having worked on these movies so much and learned so much about the power of composition and behavior over dialogue, and that dialogue is a symptom. It's a consequence of plot. 'Mission' [movies] are so plotty because you're trying to stitch together many ambitious sequences in one movie. You have to create the reasons that make them emotional. That's where all the plot comes from, which is where all the exposition comes from. And the 'gnarly' movie has without a doubt, probably the simplest plot. It's the most straightforward human story I've worked on, and it's the kind of movie I've always wanted to make. If you don't surrender to 'Mission,' it will crush you. You just put your ego in check and push yourself technically as far as you can go. The impression is that it's Tom's movie, and Tom is totally in control. The reality is the movie is in control. The audience is in control. There's no getting around the dialogue that people were wincing at. You need to communicate it simply, to a global audience. Don't be a snob. Just say it upfront, get it done with and done right. The 'gnarly' movie is not burdened by that plot or those sequences. It's still a deeply human story and it's still very, very emotional, but they're in a much more intimate and brutal world than a 'Mission Impossible' world. The 'John Wick' movies are moving away from Keanu Reeves as the main character after four films, but is continuing the franchise with Ana de Armas in 'From the World of John Wick: Ballerina.' Do you see that kind of continuation for this series? Well, I mean, what is 'Mission'? It's a very specific thing with a very specific kind of filmmaking, involving an actor who performs all that action himself. If you were to spin characters off, it'd be another kind of story altogether. I'd be curious to see how that worked. One of the things I love about them is that they are a team. They're all great characters, but if you spin them off, you would lose two things entirely: One, you'd lose what Ethan Hunt brings to the franchise in terms of its scale and its action, and you'd also lose the team. It would cease to be the 'Mission' we know. That's not to say somebody couldn't invent a new 'Mission Impossible.' Having worked on a few of them, I can say, 'Good luck.'
