New year, and 2025 looks different than 2024. This year, we don’t have films delayed from the strike filling up part of the schedule. There are also at least two I was really looking forward to that got bumped to 2026. Looking at you, Batman. Still, the year is filled with options. Let’s take a look at the 2025 landscape.

January – We start the new year with a pretty thin group of films. There is next to nothing over the first half of the month as some studios are probably assuming their Christmas releases will make up for skipping the beginning of the year, like usual. However, the second half has the third entry in the excellent Paddington series (now with a new director), Leigh Whannell’s new Wolf Man film, Soderbergh’s ghost film Presence, all in the 1/17 weekend. The next will have Flight Risk, aka Mel Gibson’s film where Wahlberg is a hit man pretending to be a pilot. Finally, the last day of the month has a pair of very different films. For the families, there is Dog Man. For the adults, there is Mickey 17, which will finally be released by Warner Brothers after 9 months of delays.

February – Only 4 films worth bringing up right now for February. There will be a 4th entry in the Bridget Jones series that I am not sure who was asking for it. Osgood Perkins follows up last year’s Longlegs with a The Monkey, which is based on a 1980 short story by Stephen King. There is The Day the Earth Blew Up, which will be the first original fully animated feature film in the Looney Tunes franchise to have a worldwide release. That nugget seems insane when you think about how long Looney Tunes has been a thing. Finally, there is Captain America: Brave New World. I have no idea how to feel about this. On one hand, new MCU, so yay. On the other, this thing is a mess behind the scenes. Test screening have gone poorly, there have been so many reshoots reportedly, and the rumored budget is mind-blowing for what this movie looks like on the surface. If this fails to take off like some are sure it won’t, this could be a real harbinger of the fall of the MCU that so many are hoping for.

March – A few interesting ones this month. We have a Ryan Coogler Vampire film with Michael B. Jordan in Sinners. This is the month that Eephus film I spoke about a couple months ago comes out, so just in time for Spring Training appropriately. The Russo’s weird and expensive The Electric State shows up finally on Netflix. Lastly, and possibly least is the live action Snow White. I don’t need to get into my disdain of Disney running back the classics in live action rather than making something new. I’m having too good of a day to go down that road.

April – Not sure what there is here to look forward to after Michael got moved to festival season. That biopic of the King of Pop could be awesome or it could be a disaster. Antoine Fuqua is the director of it, so I’m leaning towards the former. What is left this month right now is the Minecraft movie, a sequel to The Accountant, and a couple thrillers that look interesting. Again, not a lot to write home about as of now.

May – Traditionally the start the Summer movie season, this year’s May lineup could go either way. Does Brave New World poison the well for Thunderbolts* in the traditional MCU release slot? Did the world really need what looks like a legacy sequel to Karate Kid? Is releasing live action Lilo & Stitch on Memorial Day weekend a good business idea? The answer to that question might be further answered by the other film opening that weekend: Mission Impossible 8. One other note for this month is Atlantis. That film is semi-autobiographical film about Pharrell Williams’ childhood. After Piece by Piece last year, that is two Williams “biopics”. Did we really need that many?

June – 6 films this month, and only two are originals. On the IP front, we have Ballerina (John Wick Spinoff), How to Train Your Dragon (live action this time), 28 Years Later (18 years after the last one, and the start of a new trilogy), and M3GAN 2.0. The other two are Elio (which was delayed from 2024) and F1. F1 is the one I will highlight here. This is Joseph Kosinski’s next big film after 2022’s Top Gun: Maverick, and with a rumored budget of $300 million, the racing scenes should be awesome to watch.

Halftime – We have reached the middle of the year, let’s take a look at what I’m most looking forward to this year, and then how wrong I’ll be this year in guessing the final Box Office standings. First, the fun list.

I’ve been waiting so long for a good Fantastic Four movie, so hopefully we get one this time. I’m cautiously hoping Wake Up Dead Man doesn’t turn into what Mickey 17 was in 2023 and get pushed to next year. It’s thought to be a Thanksgiving release like the first two Knives Out entries, but that’s is up to Netflix. Now, on to the predictions.

Avatar taking the crown this year seems like a slam dunk, but I don’t doubt the fandoms of How to Train Your Dragon or Lilo & Stitch. Either or both could pull the upset. Of the superhero movies this year, I think the Man of Steel makes the most. It isn’t on here, but Thunderbolts* could end up in the Top 10 when things are said and done. I just don’t see it happening right now. With all that said, let’s move on to the second half of the year on the preview.

July – Welp, this is the big month this year. Week 1 has the new Jurassic Park film, two weeks later is Superman, and two weeks after that is Fantastic Four: First Steps. That is three films you just saw in my box office predictions, and two on my anticipated list, including the movie I have been waiting for since Disney bought Fox. That F4 movie needs so badly to not suck. We have had 3 previous films, or 4 if you count the Corman film in 1994 that Marvel would like you to forget about. We still haven’t gotten a good one though, and hopefully this is it. The case is awesome for it. The cast is also great for Jurassic World Rebirth, but I have been burned by that franchise one to many times to not be skeptical. As for Superman, I have read some very shaky preview screening thoughts on it, and there are a lot of characters, but Gunn doesn’t have a lot of flops in his filmography, so it is a wait and see on that one

August – What I want to be excited for is the new PTA film that comes out this month, One Battle After Another. However, I am reading rumors that Warner Bros might be pushing this one to 2026, so this could be the Mickey 17 of 2024 for me, being a film I was looking forward to getting pushed by the studio. Other than that film, we have a remake of the Naked Gun with Liam Neeson that sounds interesting, and I have The Bad Guys 2 that I can see with the kids.

September – Oh boy. Is it great I only see on maybe two films this month I want to see? I think only Him and The Bride! will work for me, but it is a little puzzling seeing The Bride! is a musical. While there is a chance I see the “final” Conjuring entry, there is no way I will be seeing Downton Abbey, Gabby’s Dollhouse, or Saw 11. Three films that are far out of my orbit for very different reasons.

October – With Michael moving to this month, there are only 6 films on the release schedule for October, and they all are different levels of intriguing. First there is Roofman, a film starring Channing Tatum as the man known as the Rooftop Robber who stole from McDonalds locations. The other three films this month are all sequels. Mortal Kombat 2 starts the fight on the 24th, The Black Phone 2 get the weekend of the 17th, and after watching the first Black Phone, I ‘m not quite sure where this sequel is going to go. The big one for me this month It Tron: Ares on the 10th. I love Tron, and I will defend Legacy with my last breath. The cast is solid, but something that could be a big thing missing is the lack of Daft Punk scoring the film. Nine Inch Nails will score this one, but Daft Punk really made Legacy a great film with the music they chose for it. Hopefully NIN can do the same.

November – This month kind of has it all for me. Thanksgiving weekend has Zootopia 2, while the week before has Part 2 of Wicked. Sharing that date with the witches this year is Edgar Wright’s remake of The Running Man with Glenn Powell. The week before that has another addition of “Who asked for this?” when we get Now You See Me 3. Before all of that though, at the beginning of the month is Lanthimos’s new film Bugonia. It is a remake of the 2003 South Korean film Save the Green Planet!, and of course will star Emma Stone. It will be weird, and dialog with be awkward, but it will also probably be very good.

December – The final month only has a couple films on my radar this far out. Five Night at Freddy’s 2 is a weird film to be release during the holiday season, and it will probably be really stupid, but I’ll still watch it for some reason. The big release this month, and really for the year as a whole is Avatar: Fire and Ash. This series has printed money for Cameron, so it’s success is already guaranteed. For me, I’m just hoping I enjoy it more than I did the first two. I must have missed the boat where people thought Avatar was the greatest film ever made. They just seemed like long displays of what Cameron can create with a computers. This third one, now based on the element of fire, might be more interesting to me. I would greatly like that.

So those are my initial thoughts on 2025. It was kind of fun looking back on my 2024 post last January to see how far my mind changed. I laughed when I said that I only had 35 films of the list at that time. I am sure I said something stupid here that I will see a year from now too.