Horror will not always hit, but it hits enough in sizes big and small. Weapons grossed $151 million domestic and $260 million worldwide on a $38 million budget; Sinners grossed $279 million domestic and $368 million worldwide on a $90 million budget. And then there’s Clown in a Cornfield, which made $7.25 million on a budget under $1 million.

A24, which moved into bigger-budget and more commercial fare this year, released the one star-driven flop that qualified as a surprise: Dwayne Johnson’s The Smashing Machine, which opened with just $6 million in North America and topped out at $11 million stateside, less (sans inflation) than the $12 million debut of The Rock’s Snitch in early 2023. However, A24 also had another underdog sports melodrama, Marty Supreme, which has become among the most aspirational grossers of the year.

Okay, so Marty Supreme cost more than $60 million, and A24 may have to rely on overseas distribution presales for actual in-theaters profitability. However, the Timothée Chalamet ping-pong vehicle is on a path to pass Everything Everywhere All At Once ($77 million in 2022) as the studio’s largest domestic earner. That leaves just two horror titles, Talk to Me ($48 million in 2023) and Hereditary ($44 million in 2018), among the studio’s top 11 (unadjusted) domestic grossers.

Not every A24 release hits paydirt (R.I.P. Death of a Unicorn), and the studio can sometimes make its Y2K-like whiffs vanish from the discourse as if they didn’t exist. However, between late 2024 and late 2025, the studio has seen romantic dramedies like We Live in Time, Babygirl, and Materialists (which, courtesy of Sony handling overseas distribution, topped $100 million worldwide), as well as sleepers like Friendship and Eternity pull halfway-respectable grosses right alongside the more high-profile horror titles like Bring Her Back.

The 2025 end-of-year blitz recalled the post-pandemic, year-end flood of 2023, with most studios (aside from Warner Bros.) throwing one or two movies over the plate. Even softer performers like Sony’s Anaconda (heading toward around $135 million worldwide on a $45 million budget) and Paramount’s The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants (likely to earn around three times its $64 million budget) were qualified success stories.

Elsewhere, there was the $70 million-and-counting David, which became Angel Studios’ second-biggest domestic earner, and The Housemaid, the R-rated erotic thriller starring Sydney Sweeney and Amanda Seyfried, which is on course to become Lionsgate’s first non-sequel/prequel $100 million-plus grosser since Knives Out in late 2019. (The studio was quick to announce a sequel, lest Netflix get any ideas. The movie also silenced chatter about Sweeney being box office poison because her three smaller movies from smaller distributors came and went.) Let us hope that The Housemaid, preceded by The Long Walk and the Now You See Me threequel, is the start of a rejuvenated Lionsgate that need not entirely depend on the King of Pop or the King of Kings.

Marty Supreme might make a run at $100 million domestic for A24, potentially becoming the first non-sequel, non-I.P. (loosely based on a true story), and non-fantastical such offering since Rian Johnson’s first Knives Out mystery. Disney’s Avatar: Fire and Ash might only gross $1.5 billion, partially because Disney’s Zootopia 2 is making a run at $1.7 billion. Those two, plus Lilo and Stitch—the only three Hollywood titles to top $1 billion this year—accounted for over half of Disney’s $6.8 billion global total. But the billionaires papered over an otherwise inconsistent-at-best slate, which included three underperforming MCU movies, franchise disasters like Snow White, and yet another animated original for which nobody showed up. However, Freakier Friday earned $155 million globally, to become one of the largest-grossing just-a-comedy theatricals in years.

Hollywood did make a good-faith effort to release a comparative slew of non-franchise, non-I.P., and (for what it’s worth) under-two-hour star-plus-concept movies. Sure, for every $50 million-grossing One of Them Days (the non-anime bright spot on Sony’s 2025 slate), there were comparatively underperforming (Companion), just-skating-by (Flight Risk), genuinely disappointing (Good Fortune), or outright catastrophic (A Big Bold Beautiful Journey) old-school movies. However, the attempts were sincere, and the efforts may not have been futile. But Hollywood needs to spend a few years slowly and painfully reacclimating older moviegoers or reeducating younger moviegoers to the pleasures of seeing just a good movie or an enjoyable high-concept flick featuring actors you like and/or a director whose work you admire.

Finally, a big question looming over the fate of the theatrical ecosystem, of course, is what happens with Warner Bros. Discovery. Netflix, the semi-regular enemy of the theater, is the only streamer that doesn’t really need theatrical-first feature films to boost viewership—not when 300 million subscribers will click play for star-plus-concept originals like Back in Action, The Mother, and Carry-On, and may see the multiplex as an obstacle.

One could argue that Netflix is pursuing Warner Bros. not just for the I.P., but to shutter the industry’s most aspirational major theatrical distribution company. Even if that’s a conspiracy theory, theaters have been battered by the pandemic, a dual labor strike, a five-year drought of new and viable theatrical releases, and media discourse that treats theatergoing as expendable. Nobody argued in 2021 that restaurants should never reopen because everyone can DoorDash their dinner. But if Netflix succeeds in purchasing Warner Bros. this year, we may be looking at a profoundly altered box office landscape in the very near future. And for the worse.

Thanks, Scott. I’ll see everyone tomorrow.

Matt