In 2025, the biggest movie of the summer wasn’t on the big screen but on streaming. Sony Animation had a surprise hit with K-Pop Demon Hunters, which is now the most watched movie to ever play on Netflix.

The movie centers around the trio of K-pop superstars Rumi (voiced by Arden Cho), Mira (May Hong), and Zoey (Ji-young Yoo), who together form the band HUNTR/X. The girls use their music to fuel the honmoon, a spirit gate that seals the world off from demons, and HUNTR/X has almost reached the popularity needed for the honmoon to “go golden” and cut off the demon realm forever. However, a rival K-pop boy band made of demons and a secret Rumi has kept from her friends threaten to pull the honmoon—and HUNTR/X—apart.

K-Pop Demon Hunters gets honorable mention status because it’s impossible to directly compare it to the films that didn’t go straight to streaming. Of the 236 million total views the film has gotten as of August 26, it’s hard to say how many would have not seen the film if they had to go to the theaters to see it. However, K-Pop Demon Hunters did get a box office total—it had a limited three-day run in theaters in August so that it could qualify for the Best Animated Feature Academy Award. The film made $18 million showing on 1700 screens, earning it the rank of #29 at the 2025 domestic summer box office.

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In the post-pandemic movie landscape, horror has been the most reliable genre for studios as far as box office profit. Horror movies typically have smaller budgets and a loyal fanbase willing to come to theaters based only on the genre. This has led horror films to spread out of October and release throughout the year. Nine horror movies opened in wide release this summer, and two (arguably three) made the top 10.

Coming in just ahead of fellow Warner Bros. horror film Sinners was Weapons, Zach Cregger’s sophomore effort after gaining critical acclaim with 2022’s Barbarian. Like Barbarian, Weapons has a seemingly simple premise that suddenly veers into the macabre and unexpected.

Weapons examines the inhabitants of a Pennsylvania town one month after 17 fourth-graders from the same class simultaneously run away from home in the middle of the night and disappear. Julia Gardner stars as the teacher of that ill-fated fourth-grade class, Josh Brolin as the father of the vanished class bully, and Benedict Wong as the school’s principal.

The film continues a box office winning streak for Warner Bros. since A Minecraft Movie became the top-grossing film of the year (so far). With a $38 million budget, Weapons will easily make over $50 million in profit worldwide after it closes in a few weeks.

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Just above Weapons is another horror film by WB—Final Destination: Bloodlines. This sixth entry in the horror franchise is notable for not just reviving a dormant IP (the last Final Destination film was 14 years ago) but also for being the highest-grossing film in the franchise even after adjusting for inflation. The film also is the last to feature prolific horror actor Tony Todd, who passed away last November.

In the 1960s, Iris Campbell (Brec Bassinger) has a premonition on the night of her engagement that the new restaurant she and her fiancé are in will collapse and kill everyone inside. Her quick action evacuates the restaurant and saves over a hundred lives. Decades later, Death claims Iris before coming for her children and grandchildren, who would have never been born if not for Iris’ intervention. Tasked with saving the family by Grandma Iris, Stefani (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) must convince her brother, cousins, and parents that they are next on Death’s list before it’s too late.

While Final Destination: Bloodlines had a higher box office than Weapons, the film grossed over $300 million worldwide, earning it a profit of around $36 million in the theatrical window. A seventh film in the series was announced on August 8 with the cowriters of Bloodlines set to return.

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Getting into the blockbuster films of the summer, Warner Bros. goes three for three with F1: The Movie. This film, cofinanced by Apple Original Films, is not only Apple’s highest-grossing theatrical film to date but also star Brad Pitt’s highest-grossing film.

Thirty years ago, American racer Sonny Hayes (Pitt) saw his Formula 1 career end after a major accident on the raceway. Now, his old racing partner Rubén Cervantes (Javier Bardem) offers him a second chance as the partner of up-and-coming racer Joshua Pierce (Damson Idrus). If either Sonny or Joshua cannot place in the last nine races of the season, the team will be sold, thrusting both men into a competition with each other as much as with the other drivers.

While having a modest opening weekend compared to the other films on this list, F1: The Movie had great legs, an industry term for the ability to keep making money in theaters for a long time. In fact, F1: The Movie is the most profitable film of all time for IMAX and is only the fifth film to go back into IMAX during its original run this decade.

As an English teacher, I’m really impressed with the diversity of punctuation in this movie list. These titles feature six colons, an em dash, one ampersand, and, with this film, an asterisk.

Thunderbolts* sees a group of antiheroes from the Black Widow, Ant-Man, and Captain America films come together to stop a global threat that they, in part, are responsible for releasing on the world. This ragtag group includes White Widow (Florence Pugh), Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), Red Guardian (David Harbor), Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko), US Agent (Wyatt Russell), and the Winter Soldier (Sebastian Stan).

While Thunderbolts* made over $380 million worldwide and had great critical reviews, the film was considered a disappointment by Marvel standards. With a $280 million budget and roughly $100 million marketing cost, the film fell around $45 million short of breakeven in the theatrical window.

Some potential reasons floated for the film’s underwhelming success include superhero fatigue, Disney+ viewers waiting for streaming debuts over going to theaters, and that asterisk—after opening weekend, Marvel rebranded the film *The New Avengers, which angered some fans who believed it gave away the ending of the film (and added substantially to the marketing budget).

While Thunderbolts* lost its studio about $45 million, that’s nothing compared to the box office losses of the last film in the Mission: Impossible franchise (for now) Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning.

Originally titled Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning, Part II, Final Reckoning is indeed a direct follow-up to 2023’s Dead Reckoning cliffhanger ending. An all-powerful rogue AI named The Entity is taking over the nuclear stockpiles of the world so it can kill all the humans. To stop it, Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and his team have to locate a missing sub in the Arctic where the AI originated, use the cruciform key they spent the last movie getting to unlock the AI’s remote control on the sub, and load a computer virus into the control, which will cause the AI to switch servers, and—at that exact moment—they can trap it in what is pretty much a magic thumb drive.

What is, for now, the last film in the franchise earned nearly $600 million at the worldwide box office, which is around $27 million more worldwide than the previous film. However, the film was a financial failure when taking its budget into account. Final Reckoning was one of the most expensive films ever made—with a reported production cost of $400 million and an additional $150 million in marketing, Final Reckoning is estimated to lose more than $290 million for Paramount and its new parent company Skydance.

DreamWorks and its parent company Universal decided to take a page out of Disney’s book this summer and released their first live-action adaptation of one of their animated films.

2025’s How to Train Your Dragon is nearly a carbon copy of the 2010 CGI feature: the Vikings of Berk resolve to kill every dragon in existence, but the chief’s misunderstood son Hiccup (Mason Thames) befriends a dragon and discovers they aren’t the threat the village thinks they are. The similarity is due to Dean DeBlois, who directed the animated features and returned to the live-action version.

Telling the same story twice didn’t have a negative effect on the film, however, as it grossed $45 million more than the original domestically and is on track to make more than $35 million in profit. A live-action sequel has been greenlit and will be released in June 2027.

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The big summer tentpole for Marvel Studios was a film fans had been anticipating since Disney announced its acquisition of 20th Century Fox Studios in 2017: an MCU Fantastic Four. Named Fantastic Four: First Steps, the film lived up to its title in earning fantastic reviews despite a less-than-fantastic box office.

In a retrofuturist Marvel Universe, a family of astronauts transformed after a space flight gone wrong are the first and only superheroes. The film starts years into the quartet’s superhero career at the birth of Mr. Fantastic (Pedro Pascal) and the Invisible Woman’s (Vanessa Kirby) baby. Celebration turns to shock as an alien envoy called the Silver Surfer (Julia Garner, who also starred in Weapons) comes to Earth with an ultimatum: the Four can sacrifice baby Franklin to a planet-eating entity called Galactus (Ralph Ineson) or see their world devoured.

Critics and audiences alike praised the film for its visuals and tone–Variety noted that a common thread through all the praise for the film was its break from the rest of the MCU’s quippy tone and complicated continuity. However, the appropriately fourth-biggest film of the summer also underperformed expectations after a steep 67.7% box office drop in week 2, the fifth highest in franchise history, tying Thor: Love and Thunder. The same issues that depressed the box office for Thunderbolts* are also being blamed for the mediocre receipts of First Steps. While the film was far from a box office bomb, the film is still around $90 million away from profitability in the theatrical window.

While some critics and fans thought the Jurassic Park/World franchise was extinct after the letdown that was 2022’s Jurassic World: Dominion, this summer’s Jurassic World: Rebirth proves there is still some life left in the dino-centered IP.

A pharmaceutical executive (Rupert Friend) recruits paleontologist Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey) to help him and a band of mercenaries—led by assassin Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson) and boat captain Duncan Kincaid (Mahershala Ali)—get blood samples from the largest land, sea, and air dinosaurs to develop a drug to cure heart disease. However, their already difficult task is compounded when they encounter a family marooned at sea and a secret lab with a new mutant dinosaur called the D-Rex.

While Rebirth hit a lot of the same beats as the past few films, the familiarity didn’t keep audiences away. The third-highest-grossing film domestically this summer was also the second-highest-grossing at the worldwide box office, making $855.6 million in all markets. The film has made around $50 million profit in the theatrical window, but with the lowest opening of all Jurassic films when adjusted for inflation and a B Cinemascore (second-lowest in the franchise), a sequel may not be coming for a few years.

Arguably, the summer box office for the past 20 years has been dominated by superhero films and, to a lesser extent, the rivalry between Disney’s Marvel Studios and Warner Bros. DC Studios. The rivalry quickly turned into a one-sided pummeling: Marvel put up multiple billion-dollar-grossing films in the late 2010s while DC lost money with nearly every film. However, this summer seems to be a turning point for the Distinguished Competition with Superman, the first film in their rebooted franchise universe.

Three weeks after Superman (David Corenswet) stops the Middle Eastern country of Boravia from invading its neighbor Jahrenpur, the American public has soured on Superman for interfering with a US ally. Billionaire baldy Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult) jumps on this opportunity to paint Superman as a threat in the media in hopes that the US government will let him execute the alien hero. The only ones who can clear Superman’s name and save him from Luthor’s evil machinations are his girfriend Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan); Mr. Terrific, the third-smartest person in the world (Edie Gathegi); and Krypto, Superman’s poorly trained, superpowered foster dog.

Directed by James Gunn, Superman flew into theatres on July 12 to mostly positive reviews. The film was widely praised for its dynamic action scenes and its hopeful tone, a contrast to both Superman’s previous appearances in Man of Steel and Batman v. Superman and recent Marvel films Thunderbolts* and Fantastic Four: First Steps. The comparison to that latter film is particularly notable, as both received an A- Cinemascore and similar scores on Rotten Tomatoes, yet Superman had a smaller week-to-week decline in its box office and, as of writing, is currently on track to break even in the theatrical window.

While Superman flew high, another alien managed to climb higher and secure both the top of the domestic and international box offices this summer. Disney’s Lilo & Stitch is a live-action remake of the 2000 animated feature and is the only movie this summer to gross over $1 billion worldwide.

Experiment 626, a biological weapon created to destroy cities, escapes containment and crashes on the island of O’ahu in Hawai’i. To blend in until it can figure out a way off the island, 626 pretends to be a dog and is adopted by six-year-old Lilo (Maia Kealoha) and her older sister Nani (Sydney Agudong). While Stitch causes trouble for Lilo and Nani (to the extent that CPS starts to look into taking Lilo), he is being hunted by his creator, the evil mad scientist Jumba Jookiba (Zach Galifianakis).

Unlike How to Train Your Dragon, Lilo & Stitch had some major story changes that upset some fans, yet that didn’t seem to hurt its box office at all. One of the keys to the film’s financial success was its low budget of just $100 million—this is due to the film originally being slated to debut on Disney+ before test audiences convinced executives to put the film in theaters. With the studio estimated to bank over $275 million in theatrical profit, Lilo & Stitch proves that an enjoyable film with a reasonable budget will beat out a franchise blockbuster with a bloated budget every time.