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Gizmodo
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Gizmodo
The 15 Best Genre Movies of Summer 2025 (and Where to Watch Them)
A few short weeks remain in the 2025 summer movie season, and we have to say, it's been a pretty great one. Lots of the big blockbusters really delivered. Lots of smaller films came out of nowhere to surprise us. And even a few streaming titles made their mark. Below, we've got our choices for the 15 best genre movies released during the summer of 2025, from the first weekend in May through the end of August. Spoiler: this is the only Marvel movie on this list. Not that we disliked Fantastic Four—it's actually pretty fun—but Thunderbolts offered us a more exciting ride, with an incredible cast of characters and a much, much better tease toward the future. Thunderbolts is now available on digital download and Blu-ray. It'll hit Disney+ on August 27. There's something to be said about a movie that just gives you exactly what it promises, does it well, and does it right. That's Clown in a Cornfield. Read our review here. Clown in a Cornfield is streaming on Shudder. Together is almost an incredible movie. Instead, it's just a really, really good, gross movie about two people who get infected with something that keeps forcing them together. Great performances, interesting relationship dynamics, and a killer ending. It's missing a little something to put it over the top, but it is still well worth seeing. Together is now in theaters and will be streaming later this year. Yup, I threw a documentary at you. This summer marked the 50th anniversary of one of the best genre movies ever, the killer shark film Jaws, and this documentary diving into seemingly every aspect of its development, production, and reception is just a joy to watch. Read our interview with the film's director here. (And while it's not exactly genre-focused, if you want another great doc from this summer, Pee-wee as Himself on HBO Max is masterful.) Jaws @ 50 is streaming on Disney+ and Hulu. The 2023 horror film Talk to Me was absolutely amazing, and its directors, Danny and Michael Philippou, followed it up with this, not quite as good, but somehow even more disturbing horror tale. Sally Hawkins gives a chilling lead performance in a film that features the most horrifying visuals of the year. Bring Her Back is now available for digital download or rental. If you were wondering, 'How can io9 do a list of best genre films of the summer when the summer isn't over yet?' here's the answer. We've seen the last major one, coming to theaters later this month, and it's a doozy. Gory, hilarious, and a fine homage to the Troma films that inspired it. Read our review here. The Toxic Avenger comes to theaters August 29. If How to Train Your Dragon was something we saw for the first time this summer, it would easily be the top movie on this list. The original is incredible. However, this 'incredible' movie is just that movie again, in live action, so while it's really wonderful, it drops a little bit down the list. Read our review here. How to Train Your Dragon is currently available for digital download or rental. Elio may have been one of the biggest box office bombs of the summer, but it's not for lack of quality. The film itself is a funny, heartfelt, stunningly beautiful adventure that's right up there with Pixar's best recent output. So, it's not Wall-E or anything, but it's certainly on par with Turning Red, Soul, etc. Read our review. Elio will be available digitally on August 19. When Oscar winner Danny Boyle and legendary writer Alex Garland teamed back up to return to the franchise they put on the map, you knew it had to be good. And it was. 28 Years Later is an intense, heartbreaking piece of worldbuilding with lots of action, emotion, and massive penises. We can't believe we only have to wait a few more months for its sequel. Read our review here. 28 Years Later is now available for digital download and rental. Arguably, the biggest hit, and surprise, of the summer was on Netflix. Who could've guessed? This tale of a K-Pop band that protects the universe from evil is not only fun and funny, but it's also got some of the catchiest movie music in recent memory. It loses a little steam towards the end, but no matter. It's still a blast. KPop Demon Hunters can be streamed on Netflix. The sixth film in a franchise is rarely the best film in a franchise, but that's exactly what Final Destination Bloodlines is. Telling a big, sweeping story that connects the entire series, directors Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein brought an unfathomably wild set of kills to the film, making it scary and gross but also a complete blast to watch. Here's our review. Final Destination Bloodlines is currently streaming on HBO Max. James Gunn did it. He was able to bring Superman back in a big, big way with a film that's as massive as the character demands but also weird and off the rails in ways we never expected. It's the best superhero movie of the summer. Read our review here. Superman is still in theaters and arrives on digital Friday. Perfect timing! The best horror movie of the summer follows a town broken when a classroom of kids mysteriously goes missing in the night. What happens next has to be seen to be believed and, we think, will be watched and discussed over and over again. Read our review here. Weapons is currently in theaters and is likely to hit streaming later this year. Even before director Dan Trachtenberg added on an even better, more exciting end credit scene to the already awesome one he had, Predator: Killer of Killers was a winner. You just haven't lived until you've seen Predators fight across the centuries. Read our review here. Predator: Killer of Killers is streaming on Hulu. This is my list, and I'll do what I want. That's why, while it's not technically a straight genre film, I just have to call out one extra movie. It's Heads of State, the John Cena/Idris Elba movie that premiered this year on Prime Video. This rather straightforward action film is so much fun, I couldn't believe it. Light-years ahead of most films that premiere on streaming. Watch it here. And now… And yet, among all the superheroes, the killer animation, and the terrifying horror, it's a not-so-simple movie about a simple man's life that stands ahead of the rest. Mike Flanagan's adaptation of the Stephen King short story is so fresh, optimistic, and rewatchable that we haven't stopped thinking about it since we saw it. If you missed it in theaters, see it as soon as you can. You won't be disappointed. Our review is here. The Life of Chuck is now available for digital download and rental. Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what's next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.
Forbes
03-08-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
The Three Crumbling Pillars Of The MCU: What's Going On?
It has not been a great year for Marvel, with three films ranging from 'not great' to 'pretty decent' at the box office in the space of Thunderbolts, Captain America: Brave New World and now Fantastic Four. Add onto that a couple shows that were lobbed out without much fanfare (Ironheart, Eyes of Wakanda) and a supposed fan-favorite that was underwatched (Daredevil: Born Again), and 2025 was not ideal. But of course, the general sense is that post-Endgame, the MCU has been lost at sea to some extent, and has not and likely will not reach the peak of Endgame and everything that came before. Why? You can say the ever-cited 'superhero fatigue' or the fact that movie tickets cost too much, but in the context of Marvel, it's more than that. In my view, there are three main pillars of the MCU that have had cracks shooting through them for years now. Too Many Releases, And Too Many Disconnected Releases Even Marvel realized eventually that dumping out something like three shows and three movies a year was overkill, and will allegedly tone that down from here, but it took more than a half decade to figure it out. It was overwhelming and many fans would just throw up their hands and be content to miss one film or another. Marvel has previously said that their movies felt too much like 'homework,' where'd you have to watch X other movie or show to know what's happening in the next movie. While that was true to some extent, The Marvels had three characters that required viewing of a first film, and two separate TV shows to know all the leads, that didn't happen all that often. Rather, it was that the stories were mostly disconnected, not leading toward any sort of ultimate goal that made any amount of sense. There was this vague idea for a minute that Kang would be the new Big Bad, first introduced in Loki, of all places, and then he showed up in the third Ant-Man movie, of all places, and was beaten by…ants. You can see the problem. Elsewhere, what did we have? Black Widow, a prequel film that should have been made years earlier for it to make sense. The Eternals, a moonshot full of people no one had ever heard of. Now more recently Thunderbolts, an assembled cast of C-listers from over the past 6-8 years or so. While they are throwing many of these characters together for the new Avengers movies, this has not been a coherent, connected plan. Abandoned Heroes This has two meanings, namely that post-Endgame, characters were simply lost. Iron Man was famously killed. Captain America time traveled, aged and has never been seen again. Hulk showed up in co-star and cameo roles at best, and was never the full focus of a film. Thor had one great movie and one so bad it killed hype for his character. There has not been an ability to build up a core cast like this again. Recently, Sam Wilson's new Captain America (mantle passing, in that case, was also a big problem) was tasked with assembling a new Avengers. Which would be…who, exactly? After all these years, it feels like we don't have a re-formed cast that makes any sense. Also by 'abandoned heroes,' we have one-and-done offerings. That would be the aforementioned Eternals, but also Shang-Chi, who was built up to be a hugely important character and then never got any sequel. None of these new-era heroes have gotten more than one movie focused on them specifically, something that was not the case with Iron Man, Captain America and Thor especially in the run-up to the various Avengers movies. The Nostalgia Trap Card One point here is that well, there are still huge-earning movies in this era, two of the highest being Spider-Man: No Way Home and Deadpool and Wolverine. These movies were entertaining, sure, but they both relied heavily on audience connections not with the story, but with the mere appearance of characters they used to love. In Spider-Man, of course, that was two previously Spider-Man in the form of Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield. In Deadpool and Wolverine, it's easy to even lose count, from Chris Evans taking up the mantle of Johnny Storm, Ben Affleck-era Jennifer Garner Elektra, Blade. They threw everything at the wall. You are eventually going to run out of nostalgia to pull from here. Even now, what's the big focus of the upcoming Avengers Doomsday? The return of a slew of FOX-era X-Men past the Deadpool and Wolverine ones, and then the return of Robert Downey Jr. himself, which I would consider a different form of nostalgia, in this case for a better era of the MCU itself, even if he's playing a different role. The story is that the MCU's biggest star is somehow back. Those are my takeaways from what's going on. There's more past that, but it's been rough, and I'm not sure when it's going to get better from here. Follow me on Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram. Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
