Lilo & Stitch, Sinners, Mission Impossible

How has the box office fared so far in 2025?

As the year hits its halfway point, Hollywood has fielded blockbusters like “Lilo & Stitch” and “Sinners,” as well as some expensive blunders with the likes of “Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning,” “Captain America: Brave New World” and “Elio” on course to be painful money losers.

The good news is there’s been a better mix of broadly appealing tentpoles (“A Minecraft Movie”), kid friendly fare (“How to Train Your Dragon”) and critically acclaimed movies for older crowds (“The Phoenician Scheme”). As a result, ticket sales are up 18% from 2024, according to Comscore. But the movie business has yet to regain its pre-COVID form, with the box office down 26% from 2019, when a pandemic just seemed like a dystopian idea from a Steven Soderbergh movie.

There’s still plenty of promise on the horizon, from “Superman” to “Wicked: For Good” to “Avatar: Fire and Ash,” which should keep multiplexes packed in the coming months. But with six months of grosses in the can, here’s a look at what soared, struggled and fell flat at the box office.

Lilo & Stitch

Global box office: $910 million
Budget: $100 millions

Stitch, welcome to the A-list. Turns out, 23 years was the perfect amount of time for the rowdy blue alien creature to become a lightning rod of nostalgia for millennials, who turned out in force alongside family crowds. Initially planned as a straight-to-streaming release, the live-action remake of 2002’s animated comedy is on pace to become the year’s first billion-dollar blockbuster. And that’s just the theatrical windfall. Stitch-themed merchandise has been all the rage long before he and Lilo returned to the big screen. In 2024, Disney sold $2.6 billion in consumer products featuring the “Lilo & Stitch” characters. Now that he’s the biggest star of the summer, expect that figure to skyrocket when Christmas and Hanukkah roll around. That’s a lot of Stitch mayhem!

Sinners

Global box office: $363.8 million
Budget: $90 million

With “Sinners,” an ambitious, R-rated slice of Southern Gothic, director Ryan Coogler defied the odds to prove that audiences can get excited about something unique. Word-of-mouth for the Warner Bros. film was so strong that “Sinners” earned nearly as much in its second weekend as in its first, an unprecedented result for a film that didn’t open over the holiday season. It helped that “Sinners” received some of the year’s best reviews. And Michael B. Jordan, who starred in the film as twin bootleggers who open a juke joint in the Mississippi Delta, demonstrated once again that he’s the rare box office draw. At a time when studios have become congenitally risk averse, “Sinners” validates that sometimes it pays to take chances.

A Minecraft Movie

Global box office: $954.4 million
Budget: $150 million

It took more than a decade to bring this video game adaptation to the screen, during which Warner Bros. and Legendary shuffled through directors and concepts. Well, it was worth the wait. Thanks to its family friendly approach and the presence of stars like Jason Momoa and Jack Black, “A Minecraft Movie” grossed more than $950 million. And credit director Jared Hess (“Napoleon Dynamite”) with finding a comic tone that helped the movie appeal to more than just video game buffs. The smash hit arrived at a welcome time for Warner Bros. film chiefs Michael De Luca and Pam Abdy, whose jobs seemed to be on the line until “A Minecraft Movie” and “Sinners” silenced their doubters. But there’s more at play here. “A Minecraft Movie” is part of a wave of PG-rated, all-ages blockbusters that are rivaling comic book movies in popularity.

Final Destination Bloodlines

Global box office: $280 million
Budget: $50 million

Don’t underestimate the commercial appeal of comically outrageous and creatively disturbing fatalities. After a 14-year hiatus, “Final Destination Bloodlines” officially resurrected the long-running horror series. The sixth entry in the stomach-squelching property, in which people die in increasingly insane accidents, is the highest-grossing of the franchise thanks to bloody good reviews and a killer concept. Death for the win!

Materialists

Global box office: $31.4 million
Budget: $20 million

Celine Song’s follow-up to “Past Lives” is shaping up to be today’s rare arthouse hit. That’s partly because it wasn’t marketed like a typical indie release. A24 positioned the movie as a romantic comedy with a love triangle comprised of glamorous movie stars like Dakota Johnson, Pedro Pascal and Chris Evans looking like their glamorous selves. It worked. “Materialists” opened to $12 million, the third-biggest debut for A24 following “Civil War” ($25.5 million) and “Hereditary” ($13.5 million). The film has inspired intense online debates, many of them over how Johnson’s character pays for her nice digs and designer duds on $80K a year. That gave “Materialists” impressive staying power; the film dropped less than 50% in its second weekend of release.

Snow White

Global box office: $205 million
Budget: $250 million

Who is the fairest of them all? Certainly not “Snow White,” which proved that not every Disney classic is worthy of the revival treatment. With a dated premise, creative struggles and too many controversies, the poorly reviewed “Snow White” wasn’t able to shake off the bad buzz and will go down as a massive money loser. Not everything is destined for a happily ever after.

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning

Global box office: $540.8 million
Budget: $400 million

Ethan Hunt has thwarted ruthless arms dealers, brutal terrorists, even some batshit AI, but the super spy was no match for basic economics. In order to make a profit, you need to earn more than you spend. In this, “The Final Reckoning” failed spectacularly. The film costs $400 million to produce and more than $100 million to market. And since theater owners keep roughly half of ticket sales, “The Final Reckoning” won’t bring back anywhere close to what Paramount shelled out to make it. To be fair, nobody anticipated “The Final Reckoning” would be so pricey. Yet that’s the reality of shepherding a globe-trotting action blockbuster in the midst of the pandemic and then two industry-shuttering strikes. Still, if Ethan Hunt comes back for another mission, he’s going to need to learn to economize. That might mean swapping that nuclear submarine for a Honda Accord.

Elio

Global box office: $34.9 million in its opening weekend
Budget: $150 million

Pixar is used to making box office history, but “Elio” is going down in record books for all the wrong reasons. With $20 million domestically and $34 million globally in its liftoff, the original space adventure stands as the worst opening weekend in Pixar’s 30-year history. Unlike the animation empire’s prior misfires, “Lightyear” and “Onward,” a lack of quality wasn’t the thing that kept family audiences at home. Now “Elio” hopes to forge a path similar to 2023’s “Elemental,” which overcame poor initial ticket sales to reach nearly $500 million globally. Positive critical reception and audience response should help the intergalactic tale endure at the box office over time. However one thing is clear: original animation is seriously challenged.

Hurry Up Tomorrow

Global box office: $7.6 million
Budget: $15 million

The Weeknd may be one of the biggest musical artists on the planet, but his attempts to crossover to Hollywood have flamed out in spectacular fashion. (His first project, HBO’s “The Idol,” in which the Weeknd plays a Svengali-esque night club owner and cult leader, was the most talked about show during summer 2023 — for all the wrong reasons). In “Hurry Up Tomorrow,” a thriller and companion piece to the singer’s studio album of the same name, the Weeknd plays a fictionalized version of himself, an insomniac musician on the verge of a mental breakdown. Critics dismissed the film as all flash and “no substance.” It’s hard to know if moviegoers agreed because none of them showed up to theaters to find out for themselves.

The Alto Knights

Global box office: $9.5 million
Budget: $45 million

Warner Bros. thought audiences would turn up to see two Robert De Niros for the price of one. Instead, the studio got a big ol’ write-down and one of the year’s biggest flops. The gangster picture was directed by Barry Levinson and featured De Niro in a familiar mean streets backdrop. But times have changed, and “The Alto Knights” looked like something from another era. After the scathing reviews hit, “The Alto Knights” was sleeping with the fishes in an ocean of red ink.

Thunderbolts

Global box office: $381 million
Budget: $180 million

“Thunderbolts” was positioned as a return to form for Disney’s Marvel Cinematic Universe, which had served up more than a few clunkers in the post-“Avengers: Endgame” era. For the first time in a long time, critics and audiences dug the superhero adventure. And yet! After failing to hit the $400 million mark globally, it’ll go down as one of the lowest-grossing installments in the entire MCU. Though Marvel remains Hollywood’s most consistent hit maker — and the highest grossing film franchise in history with $31 billion across 36 films — “Thunderbolts” confirms there’s a new ceiling for superhero movies that aren’t based on marquee characters. If Marvel wants to keep expanding its cinematic universe, it’ll need to figure out a way to replenish the well without relying on Robert Downey Jr. to keep saving the day.

From the World of John Wick: Ballerina

Global box office: $100 million
Budget: $90 million

It’s never a good sign when a studio’s marketing department adds a clunky addendum (in this case, “From the World of John Wick”) to a film’s title in the lead-up to its big-screen release. Lionsgate’s attempt to spell out the connection between the Ana de Armas-led spinoff and the four-film series anchored by Keanu Reeves didn’t pay off in spades. A $100 million global gross is impressive (except when factoring in the $90 million production budget), though “Ballerina” didn’t inspire much of the “John Wick” fandom to buy a movie ticket. That’s a problem because Lionsgate is trying to expand the cinematic universe with and without Reeves as the professional hitman. The studio needs audiences to care in order to justify that pricey endeavor.

Black Bag

Global box office: $42.9 million
Budget: $50 million

Critics loved Steven Soderbergh’s sleek and sexy spy thriller, and it’s $42.9 million global gross isn’t bad for a sophisticated movie aimed at adults. The problem was it cost too damn much. With a $50 million price tag, “Black Bag” will lose Focus Features money — and potentially lots of it. That’s unfortunate because it helps studios rationalize themselves out of backing brainier stories at a time when there are toys that can be adapted into movies. As Soderbergh himself posited in the lead up to the debut of “Black Bag”: “In theory, it’s the kind of movie that people of a certain age always complain they don’t make anymore. Does that mean they’ll show up?” Unfortunately, he got his answer.

The Amateur

Global box office: $96 million
Budget: $60 million

They don’t make ’em like “The Amateur” anymore… for good reason. This pulpy thriller with Rami Malek as a CIA cryptologist who is hellbent on exacting revenge on terrorists who betrayed him seemed like a throwback to ’90s-era moviemaking. It’s exactly the kind of star-driven action flick that has become a staple of streaming (we see you “Old Guard,” “Carry On” and “The Bodyguard”), so it’s the type of movie that’s nearly impossible to get people into theaters to see. So-so reviews were the kiss of death, with Variety’s Owen Gleiberman declaring the movie in one of its better notices, “never less than watchable.” For something like “The Amateur” to work, the execution has to be flawless. Adequate is not gonna cut it.

The Accountant 2

Global box office: $102.1 million
Budget: $80 million

Apparently, somebody thought it was a good idea to make a sequel to decade-old Ben Affleck thriller that people barely remembered. It’s true that “The Accountant 2” was backed by Amazon MGM Studios, which views success and failure differently than more conventional studios because the company makes most of its money selling clothes and toilet paper instead of through ticket sales and licensing deals. That means the studio views a theatrical release more like a marketing opportunity for its Prime Video streaming service. Still, with these lackluster results, there’s got to be a cheaper way to get subscribers.