Supermeh?: A look back at this summer’s box office

Graphic by Easton Clark, Photography Editor

“Superman” soared, Stitch and Tom Cruise set records over Memorial Day weekend and “Weapons” haunted audiences as it took the box office by storm. 2025’s $2.67 billion haul at the U.S. box office this summer is even with last year’s, but the gap that remains between now and years past is vast. 

$2.67 billion is still a few hundred million short of 2023’s summer, often remembered for the “Barbenheimer” phenomenon. More than that, the number is a little over a billion away from catching up to 2019’s, the last box office summer before the pandemic closed theaters down for nearly a year, drastically shifting the moviegoing landscape.

Even though it didn’t beat Disney’s $1 billion-plus earnings, Warner Bros had an unparalleled string of success across genres with both franchise and original films. It had the biggest gains from last summer among all studios.

“Certainly, at the beginning of this year, people were very concerned about their movies because they had a few misses. And, you know, there would have been a big regime change, and this is the first set of movies coming in under the new regime,” said Dodge College associate professor Travis Knox. “They just started smacking them out of the park. Obviously, (“A Minecraft Movie”) couldn't be any bigger. “Weapons” was a huge surprise … I would say they won the year.”

Zach Cregger’s “Weapons” performed better than the rest of the cinematic offerings in August, staying the number one grossing film for four weekends in a row.

“(It) kept beating these new movies coming up,” Knox said. “They obviously had an amazing marketing campaign and got a lot of attention, but in order to (be number one) four weekends in a row, you're delivering a movie people like to go see.”

Hype was a word I kept hearing when the topic of “Weapons” arose. It’s clear that Cregger’s horror debut, “Barbarian,” earned him some goodwill with horror fans. On top of that, they used a marketing campaign that made the most of the images of children eerily dashing down dark suburban streets, arms outstretched, as well as concealing the ultimate evil behind this inexplicable exodus, which got people interested enough to buy a ticket. 

Frequent moviegoer and junior creative producing student Keaton Kugler was among the eager. He explained what got him fired up for Cregger’s latest, which he’s gone back and seen multiple times.

“Ever since ‘Barbarian,’ I've been excited for what Zach Cregger does next,” Kugler said. “There was the whole bidding war with the script and stuff. So the hype was on, but I totally thought it lived up to it.”

Between “Weapons” and “Final Destination: Bloodlines,” as well as gems on the indie side like “Together,” Dodge College associate professor Russell Schwartz saw the wider wave of horror successes as the biggest surprise of the summer.  

“The whole slasher thing has gone away, which is probably for the best. So these horror movies now, they're sort of a hybrid horror … but it's still the genre that I think has probably been the most exciting certainly, and will continue to be,” Schwartz said.

On the superhero side of things, after a promising opening weekend where it brought in over $100 million, “The Fantastic Four: First Steps” was unable to make a dent in the box office in comparison with the many (many) Marvel box office smashes that preceded it. Senior writing for film and television major Luke Cone had thoughts about Marvel’s gradual decline at the box office.

“Whenever we would go to the movies, it'd be like Star Wars, Marvel and that's kind of it, right? And those movies just haven't been as good lately… the quality has gone down,” Cone said. “I think that appetite for blockbuster stuff is still there. It's just not being fed.”

A shared sentiment among the people I talked to was the hope that Apple will see the success of their Brad Pitt-starring thrill ride “F1” and make more of an effort to make movies for the big screen.

“I think (Apple’s) model is kind of just to throw a lot of money at projects and make it look super expensive and bring in a couple stars … why wouldn't you bring it to the theaters?” Cone said. “The big draw (of ‘F1’) for me was the spectacle, it felt like you're in the race car, and it's so loud and engrossing. So I think that was the right move to put it in the theaters.”

Schwartz and Knox echoed Cone’s sentiments, remarking on what a fitting selection it was for IMAX.

The biggest bomb of the summer, for Knox, was “M3GAN 2.0,” which turned the horror premise of a robot gone lethal on its head and embraced a campier tone and action sequences.

“I was completely shocked by ‘M3GAN 2.0,’ and I understand that they went for a different tone, and maybe that messed it up … I think that was the biggest surprise for something that I thought was going to open big time, and just nobody came,” Knox said.

A movie that performed not as well as some would’ve liked was the reboot of “The Naked Gun” starring Liam Neeson. It was not the comedy smash hit that Cone was hoping it would be.

“The theater I saw it in was relatively packed, and people were laughing, and it seemed like it would be really successful,” Cone said. “I've been wanting comedies to come back into theaters for a long time … I don't think there's been a smash hit like that to really prove to studios that there's a big market for comedies.”

There’s been a consistent discussion around the friction between movie theaters and streaming for as long as Netflix has been collecting eyeballs, but the success of “KPop Demon Hunters” poses an interesting wrinkle within that conversation. The most watched film in Netflix’s recorded history also made tens of millions in only two days in theaters — and that’s without playing at AMC, the largest movie theater chain in America. 

Knox had some suggestions in regards to Netflix’s stance towards movie theaters and windowing, which is the amount of times a movie plays in theaters. He cited the truncated theatrical run the sequel to “Knives Out,” “Glass Onion,” received, as a key example of the streaming service leaving money on the table.

“If I was Netflix, I'd be like, ‘Okay, this movie's testing really well. We know we're going to make money,’ and then you just give the windows back to the theaters and let them air it for you and show it with you,” Knox said. “I think it's a bad model just to go straight to the theater, because the theaters aren't actually going to go away.”

Looking ahead beyond the fall and winter, the outlook for the future of moviegoing as a dominant cultural pastime is uncertain. Knox hopes that the theatrical business continues to re-expand the further we get from the pandemic, highlighting recent data that shows Gen Alpha prefers moviegoing over every other generation polled as well as “Sinners” and “F1’s” run proving that original films connected in no way to any franchise can still make a mark.

Kugler bears a similar optimism towards the subject, boosted by the success of a movie like “Weapons.”

“You're always seeing these records being broken — the highest Thanksgiving release, or the highest Memorial Day weekend, stuff like that. My hope is just that studios are going to listen and see that, ‘Oh, this is what people want.’ I think everybody wants more original stories,” Kugler said.

Schwartz said he thinks the box office has reached a plateau and that we’re unlikely to reach the box office heights of the prior decade again, particularly given the many things garnering people’s attention from an endless stream of videos to a wealth of streaming services distributing must-see content on a weekly basis. 

“You’re constantly distracted, probably much more so than you were five years ago,”Schwartz said. “It'll fluctuate, but I think it'll probably be in this area in the foreseeable future. It could go down, it could go up, … but it'll never get to that $11 (billion) again.”