Disney maintained its lead in summer marketshare at the 2025 box office but the toast of the town was Warner Bros., which came in a close second thanks to standout hits including Weapons, Superman and Apple Original Films’ record-smashing F1: The Movie starring Brad Pitt, as well as enjoying carryover money from spring blockbusters A Minecraft Movie and Sinners. Not so long ago, some thought Warners film studio chiefs Michael De Luca and Pamela Abdy were gone. Not anymore.
Heading into the season, Weapons and F1 were nowhere to be found when Fandango put out its annual survey of the top-10 most anticipated summer films. The survey was close to being bang-on correct regarding No. 1 on the list, which was Jurassic World Rebirth. Many in Hollywood were dubious as to whether Universal and Amblin could reboot the Jurassic franchise for a third time, and birth a new trilogy more than three decades after Steven Spielberg’s dinos first stomped onto the big screen in 1993’s Jurassic Park. But relaunch it they have.
Jurassic World Rebirth is the summer’s second-biggest film, with more than $855.6 million in worldwide ticket sales behind Disney’s live-action Lilo & Stitch (Lilo was No. 9 on Fandango’s list). Yet Lilo is the only film of the year so far to have crossed $1 billion globally, with total earnings of $1.33 billion through Sept. 1. It has played both to families and to nostalgic teenagers and Gen Zers who grew up watching the 2002 animated film of the same name about the friendship forged between a lonely Hawaiian girl and a troublesome, pet-like, blue alien. Like Aladdin or The Little Mermaid, it points to the limitless financial potential of tapping into such nostalgia.
Warners rebound has been anchored by Joseph Kosinski’s F1: The Movie. The big-budget Formula One movie finished Labor Day with more than $613 million in worldwide ticket sales, a sum no one thought possible considering its lead star is in his early 60s and this particular racing sport has never been all that popular in the U.S. (that’s why no studio would shell out $200 million to $300 million to make the racing film; instead Apple Original Films made the pic, and brought on Warners as its distribution and marketing partner).
On Aug. 27, FI broke its latest record when passing up Warner and DC Studios’ Superman, a feat few could have imagined. It also is the top-grossing sports pic of all time, and the best of Pitt’s career, not adjusted for inflation.
Abdy and De Luca also became heroes of the summer box office when originality paid off in a major way with the mid-August release of Zach Cregger’s Weapons. The film has became a cultural sensation, grossing north of $250 million to date against a $38 million budget. (Naysayers were just as dismissive when Ryan Coogler’s original pic Sinners, another De Luca and Abdy project, opened in theaters in April. They were silenced when the pic topped out north of $455.7 million globally.)
It’s true that Superman, which has earned $611 million to date worldwide, has given DC a much longed-for win over Marvel, but the Man of Steel can’t exactly gloat. Superhero fatigue at the box office, a phenomenon which is now impacting the foreign box office in a major way, remains a major issue.
Elsewhere, the ever-steady Universal remained in fine standing this summer between Jurassic World Rebirth and DreamWorks Animation’s live-action How to Train Your Dragon, which is the third top-grossing Hollywood title of the summer with a global cume of $629 million (it’s the first time DWA has borrowed from the Disney playbook and made a live-action adaptation of one of its library titles).
Paramount and Sony both had tough summers, albeit for different reasons. The former was in the midst of waiting for the Skydance merger to close as it released Tom Cruise’s latest Mission: Impossible movie, The Final Reckoning. Sony was left bereft in terms of having a summer tentpole to release because of delays related to the labor strikes, say insiders.
On Sept. 2, Comscore revised its summer revenue estimate after it finished tallying Labor Day numbers. For the period May 2-Sept. 1, domestic revenue came in at $3.672 billion, a decline of 0.10 percent from last year’s $3.672 billion. Comscore initially forecast a decline of 0.2 percent.
Below is summer domestic, international and global revenue broken down by the five major legacy studios.
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