Every December, cinephiles ask: Was this a good year for movies? By the end of 2025, I knew my answer instantly: Yes.
The box office told a different story. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, annual box-office grosses routinely reached $10 to $11 billion. This year, totals are expected to fall short of $9 billion.
“It looks like it’s going to be two years in a row that the industry flatlined,” Alamo Drafthouse COO Michael Sherrill told Variety.
But if you look beyond the box-office numbers, you’d see the year was packed with wonderful movies. And it’s just one reason we should be paying less attention to what the box office tells us.
Underrated gems were everywhere
Not every year has a “Barbenheimer,” which together raked in $2.4 billion at the box office in 2023, but that doesn’t mean there weren’t plenty of five-star films in 2025.
Some of the best movies of the year included “28 Years Later,” “Blue Moon,” “Sentimental Value,” “Splitsville,” “Hamnet,” “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You,” “Black Bag,” and “Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning,” and all but two made less than $11 million worldwide.
“The Final Reckoning,” which grossed $598 million at the box office, was still unable to become profitable due to ballooning production costs, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Another, “Black Bag,” was a slick thriller starring Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett as a pair of married spies who are pitted against each other when a mole is discovered. This film was visually stunning, featured strong performances, and the tension never let up.
Focus Features
When it was released in March, “Black Bag” earned $44 million at the box office, likely because it catered to, for lack of a better term, “adults.” Yet Gen Z and Gen Alpha are the generations “sort of single-handedly keeping film alive” more than any others, according to reports from CinemaUnited and the National Research Group, suggesting there may be a ceiling on how far adult-focused theatrical releases like “Black Bag” can go today. By comparison, another Soderbergh-directed thriller, “Out of Sight,” made nearly double that in 1998.
Another great 2025 film, “Sorry, Baby,” was a movie written by, directed by, and starring Eva Victor in their directorial debut. Victor played a college professor grappling with the aftermath of a sexual assault. It was simultaneously heartbreaking, funny, and uplifting.
It also only made $3 million at the box office — a respectable total for a small indie film with a reported budget of $1.5 million and a very limited theatrical run, but not a smash by any means.
Another movie that made $3 million? “Splitsville,” which made me laugh harder than almost anything else I saw this year.
Neon
What I learned from these movies: Don’t let the “flop” label or a small box-office number scare you. Just because it didn’t have “Avengers: Endgame”-level marketing, fanfare, and box-office take-home, it doesn’t mean it’s not worth your time.
The new normal
In fact, even some of the biggest hits of the year could be considered flops by Old Hollywood standards.
Movies like “Superman,” “The Fantastic Four: First Steps,” and “Captain America: Brave New World” each earned hundreds of millions of dollars globally but fell far short of the blockbuster heights superhero films once enjoyed.
Arguably the best superhero movie of the year, “Thunderbolts*,” made $382 million worldwide, making it a superhero flop according to outlets like Variety and Screen Crush.
Marvel Studios
Over the last decade, viewers’ habits have changed; more people stay home and stream their favorite films, rather than head to theaters.
With the advent of streaming, fewer people are interested in going to cinemas. A US Kagan Consumer Insights survey, released in October, found that the percentage of frequent movie-goers dropped by 22% between 2019 and 2025.
Meanwhile, in July 2025, Netflix reported its best-ever numbers during an earnings call. Free streaming services like YouTube and Tubi increased viewership by 53% between 2023 and 2024, and Peacock gained 3 million subscribers in just the first week of the Olympics.
The era when every major release was expected to make a billion dollars is over.
We should all know less about marketing budgets
This comes as there’s more focus on the theater box office and studio budgets. Over the past decade, trade publications have leaned into coverage of how much money a movie needs to earn “to make its money back.”
This reporting only opens up films like Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners,” a record-breaking, singular film that depicts an area of the country rarely shown on screen, to bad-faith criticism, as viewers use data to tear a movie down, regardless of quality.
Eli Adé
It not only ignores creative value but also obscures other stories, such as how Coogler secured a rights deal to own the rights in 2050, which could set a new precedent for how creatives take ownership of their work.
Instead, the narrative was about how this film, which grossed over $360 million on a $90 million budget, per IndieWire, wasn’t close to making its money back.
It leads to things like this:
This phenomenon isn’t completely new. In Nancy Meyers’ “The Holiday,” a film released almost 20 years ago, a character complains we shouldn’t be tracking box-office returns like baseball scores: “Now a picture has to make a killing the first weekend or it’s dead. This is supposed to be conducive to great work?”
Still, with movies like “Sinners” and “Black Bag” in our rear-view mirrors, we should remind ourselves that box-office success shouldn’t matter to us cinema lovers — we should only care about how the movies are making us feel and think.
So, as 2026 begins, stop worrying and love the bomb — and an entire world of cinema will be opened up to you.
