As the calendar turns to fall, there’s been a lot of hand-wringing over the 2025 summer box office, which the New York Times reported was at its lowest point since 1981. The piece even got Giancarlo Esposito fired up when IndieWire asked him about the state of the industry following his Creative Arts Emmys win.
The Times analyzed how numerous blockbusters — almost all of them sequels or IP adaptations — fell short of their predecessors, and how only two weekends out of this summer surpassed $300 million cumulative at the North American box office.
All that is true, and yet the 2025 summer wound up not far off summer 2024. In fact, Comscore estimates that the box office for the year remains 3.9 percent ahead of the pace of where 2024 was at this same point last year. Even more curiously, 2025 had a dismal first quarter but bounced back with a vengeance in April thanks to “A Minecraft Movie” and “Sinners,” two Warner Bros. releases. The longtail success of those movies meant that May ’25 was actually 76 percent ahead of May ’24. It was this year’s June, July, and August that started falling behind, so it’s a bizarre, circuitous route for the box office to still wind up on par with where we were last year.
This past weekend might be indicative of what exactly is going on here. Though “The Conjuring: Last Rites” (also Warner Bros., adding to a 2025 genre home run that includes “Sinners” and “Weapons”) dominated the weekend box office with an impressive $83 million domestic gross, Disney’s theatrical release of the filmed version of the “Hamilton” stage musical wound up at No. 2 of the week with $10 million. No. 9 was a true sleeper, “Light of the World,” an animated telling of the story of Jesus Christ from a distributor that is not Angel Studios but instead came from a company called Salvation Poem Project.
“Light of the World” is the debut release from a non-profit organization that wants to share stories about Jesus, and the film made $2.4 million — more than “Superman” — from 2,075 screens and got an “A” CinemaScore, all on a weekend that is not Easter or Christmas.
Success stories like this are happening far more frequently, managing to crack the Top 10 or 20 regularly, despite the fact that a similar box office performance in the pre-Covid era might not have registered on the charts. Or that’s at least true anecdotally for Comscore’s senior analyst Paul Dergarabedian. He believes international titles like the Indian film “Coolie” that cracked the Top 10, the Chinese blockbuster “Ne Zha II” (now in U.S. theaters with an English-language dub courtesy of A24), GKIDS’ “Shin Godzilla 4K,” as well as re-releases of library films like “Jaws,” “Ponyo,” or “Prince: Sign O’ The Times,” are all driving added traffic and are outperforming other new releases by traditional distributors.
Dergarabedian tells IndieWire it’s a reflection of the amount of diversity of content available in theaters, from event cinema like the wild “KPop Demon Hunters” sing-along success that was not even reported, to re-releases like “Jaws.” But he wonders: Is there more interest in these types of movies today than in the past, or are studio releases doing so poorly that everything else now has a chance to break through?
We’ve written about how many independent distributors are popping up with just a handful of releases. They’re not trying to compete with Warner Bros., but they’re doing solid business, and some even turn into cult hits like “Hundreds of Beavers.” Oscilloscope’s annual CatVideoFest — literally a compilation of online cat videos playing in theaters — has slowly but steadily approached $1 million at the box office and has often cracked the Top 20. “Reagan,” which was released by an upstart distributor called ShowBiz Direct, has already made $30 million domestic.
None of these movies has done staggering, “Sound of Freedom”-esque numbers, the type of surprise release that single-handedly inflates the box office for the year, but let’s not forget they all count toward the final total. And boy does it need them.