‘Lilo & Stitch' Is 2025's First $1 Billion Box Office Blockbuster

Forbes

4 days ago

Director Dean Fleischer Camp's live-action remake Lilo & Stitch is about to be 2025's first $1 billion blockbuster as it should cross the magic number by sometime Wednesday at the worldwide box office.
Chris Sanders and Maia Kealoha star in "Lilo & Stitch."
Lilo & Stitch By The Numbers
Lilo & Stitch ended it's eighth weekend of release still in the theatrical top-10, with $994.9 million worldwide box office. That leaves barely more than $5 million left to the $1 billion finish line, which is just a few more days' worth of sales.
Domestically, Lilo & Stitch now sits at approximately $416 million in North America receipts. That leaves Disney's hottest film of the year just about $8 million behind A Minecraft Movie's $423.9 million as the year's highest domestic earner so far.
It'll be a close race for that stateside championship title, but Lilo & Stitch's global gross has already blown past Minecraft's impressive $955 million final cume.
Lilo & Stitch & Minecraft & Families
Studios take note, if you want blockbuster box office in the $700+ million range, let alone the $1 billion range, family audiences increasingly drive the box office top-10.
Take a close look at the top 10 films of 2024: Inside Out 2, Deadpool & Wolverine, Moana 2, Despicable Me 4, Wicked, Mufasa: The Lion King, Dune: Part Two, Godzilla x Kong, Kung Fu Panda 4, and Sonic the Hedgehog 3.
With only a few exceptions – Deadpool & Wolverine, Dune sequel, and Godzilla/Kong sequel – the winners were movies that drew heavily on family audience attendance. Even those exceptions are big-budget IP sequels with built-in family appeal, only one of them being R-rated yet within the Marvel summer tentpole category.
During the Covid era, there were some years where the top of the box office charts were a bit more mixed with adult-skewing fare, probably because there were seasons when everything was shuttered and when things were open but nobody was taking their family to indoor public gatherings.
By the end of 2025, Marvel Studio's MCU summer tentpole Fantastic Four: First Steps, Disney's unstoppable sequel Avatar: Fire and Ash, and Disney's other unstoppable sequel Zootopia 2 will all have released and entered the top-10 for this year, alongside Disney's Lilo & Stitch, Warner's A Minecraft Movie, Universal's Jurassic World, Paramount's Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning, Universal's How to Train Your Dragon, DC Studio's Superman, and Warner's F1: The Movie.
The lesson is pretty clear: the movies making $700 million to $1 billion are the ones with big family turnout. This isn't some remarkable revelation, per se, but we've watched for a while as nostalgia-driven franchises met the demands of audiences who insisted their favorite beloved childhood stories grow up with them, until every family film had to lean almost more toward the parents than the kids.
Now, theatrical business continues to undergo major evolution in the Covid era (not 'post-Covid era' since it didn't go away, we just decided to ignore it and live with it – until we don't, of course). Motivating audiences to show up requires recognizing the messages their sending about what they want and what they expect, if you want their box office dollars. People see less movies per year now than pre-Covid, so you have to be one of the three movies they decide to catch at theaters instead of at home.
There will be exceptions to the rule, but looking to thread that needle is a lot harder than understanding the rule. The hard part isn't that it requires understanding what audiences want, the hard part is understanding why audiences want that. When we've seen big tentpole sequels fail despite a history of past success, it's almost always because the projects failed to get the why right.
Lilo & Stitch End Of Year Ambitions
We are all aware Avatar: Fire and Ash will be the biggest movie of 2025, with Christmas holiday and New Year remarkably all to itself, other than Zootopia 2, which opens for Thanksgiving three weeks ahead of Avatar 3's December 19th debut. While precise revenue varied, there weren't many surprises for this year's top box office contenders, as I discussed a while back.
The year's final top-5 will probably be Avatar: Fire and Ash, Zootopia 2, Lilo & Stitch, Jurassic World: Rebirth, and Fantastic Four: First Steps. That puts A Minecraft Movie in sixth place and Superman probably in seventh, followed by How to Train Your Dragon, Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning, and F1: The Movie.
So Lilo & Stitch will likely be a top-3 finisher for the year, and certainly a top-5. Even if both Jurassic World and Fantastic Four hold strong enough to top $1 billion and pass Lilo & Stitch, I don't see a path toward anything approaching $1 billion for Superman and the rest of the top-10 will top out below $600-700 million or have already finished their runs. So worst-case would be a fifth-place finish, which is unlikely. Notice Disney's family of studios seems destined for four of those top-5 spots, any way you slice it.