Despite several major hits, 2025 saw a number of high-profile Hollywood films fail to meet box-office expectations, pointing to challenges in attracting audiences back to cinemas. The article details ten of the most infamous box-office duds, highlighting varied reasons for their commercial failure.
The Biggest Film Flops of 2025:
1.Thunderbolts* ($400m worldwide) and Captain America: Brave New World: These Marvel films underperformed, ranking low in studio history. They were deemed "leftovers" of an old MCU saga, suffering from audience fatigue, while the fresh start of Fantastic Four: First Steps was a hit.
2.Snow White: The Disney live-action remake failed to recoup its budget despite other successful remakes like Lilo & Stitch.2 Its failure is attributed to a conflicting tonal approach (reverential vs. subversive) and extensive pre-release controversy surrounding the casting of Rachel Zegler and cast members' political views, making it a "victim of its moment."
3.Mickey 17: Director Bong Joon Ho's science-fiction follow-up to the Oscar-winning Parasite was repeatedly delayed and met with negative reviews upon its February release. Despite a huge budget and starring Robert Pattinson, the film was called a "serious disappointment" with an "identity crisis," suggesting the momentum from Parasite had faded due to the long wait.
4. After the Hunt: After the Hunt stars the queen of Hollywood, Julia Roberts, and it's directed by Luca Guadagnino, the maker of the awards-tastic Call My by Your Name. This contentious MeToo drama could have been a hit, then, but it's reported to have made less than $10m (£7.5m) globally – half of Roberts's salary, apparently, and around one-eighth of the overall budget. Maybe that's simply because Guadagnino's rambling film wasn't good enough, but it could be that it wasn't good enough in certain specific ways. It's got some hefty talking points, it's got a well-dressed, big-name cast, it's got a classy, rarefied setting – Yale University's Philosophy faculty – and it's got a mystery: what went on between Andrew Garfield's academic and Ayo Edebiri's student?
5. Christy: Christy, Americana and Eden have two things in common. The first is that they all feature Sydney Sweeney in a major role. The other is that they all flopped. Christy, a biopic of the boxer Christy Martin, is especially notorious, having had one of the worst opening weekends ever in the US of any film with a wide cinema release. What makes this so remarkable is that Sweeney is currently one of the world's most popular celebrities, so the lesson could be that fame on social media isn't the same as film stardom. Another factor is that controversy over Sweeney's appearance in an American Eagle advertisement may have put off some potential cinemagoers. But what can get lost in the discourse is that she keeps making worthwhile independent films that don't exploit her pin-up looks. Anyone But You may have been sold on the sight of her and Glen Powell in their swimming costumes, but Immaculate (2024) and Reality (2023) were unglamorous, risk-taking projects, and this year's flops were hardly mainstream Hollywood blockbusters. "We don’t always just make art for numbers, we make it for impact," said Sweeney on Instagram when Christy hit the canvas. She may have had a point.
6. I Know What You Did Last Summer: Did studio executives know what they were doing when they greenlit I Know What You Did Last Summer? Well… sort of. There have been two lucrative revivals of 1990s/ 2000s teen horror franchises recently, Scream and Final Destination. And one of those franchises, Scream, started with a screenplay written by Kevin Williamson. So what could be more profitable than reviving another spooky 1990s franchise which also began with a Williamson script? That was the theory, anyway. In fact, the legacy sequel's takings were relatively paltry, raising a fundamental question: just how well-loved was the 1997 film in the first place? Not as well-loved as Scream and Final Destination, that's for sure. Scream fans have never stopped buying Ghostface masks, and the chain-reaction deaths in Final Destination are ideal social-media fodder.
7. Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere: Deliver Me from Nowhere could have been this year's answer to A Complete Unknown – a drama about a revered American singer-songwriter that focused on one key point in his career. Jeremy Allen White from The Bear put in the effort to sing and play like Bruce Springsteen, and the writer-director, Scott Cooper, had already made an Oscar-nominated film about an American singer-songwriter – albeit a fictional one – Crazy Heart (2009). Despite all that, audiences didn't fancy watching a rock star moping around New Jersey, having a minor romance, and recording an album of quiet acoustic tracks in his bedroom. What they wanted was the surging energy and urgent storytelling that enliven so many of Springsteen's stadium anthems. Deliver Me from Nowhere went nowhere. As refreshing as it may be when a biopic decides to home in on a small segment of its subject's life, sometimes the whole "rags to riches / burn out / redemption" arc is what's required.
8. Elio: Pixar's Inside Out 2 was the biggest film in the world in 2024, so hopes were high for the studio's next cartoon. Those hopes crashed down to earth when Elio was released in June. It wasn't that the film was terrible, but it was fatally compromised. A science-fiction coming-of-age adventure, it was conceived as a personal story by Adrian Molina, the co-director of Coco, who was inspired by his own lonely childhood on a military base. But then, in 2024, Molina left the project, along with other key personnel, to be replaced by two different directors. The result was a cartoon that no longer had a compelling reason to exist; as with two other recent Disney flops, Strange World (2022) and Wish (2023), it was tricky to summarise the plot or to explain what was at stake. The film might have been better, it seems, if Molina had just been left to get on with it. Ultimately, the Disney alien that made a fortune this year was Stitch from Lilo & Stitch rather than any of the bug-eyed extra-terrestrials in Elio.
9. M3GAN 2.0: Why did M3GAN 2.0 malfunction? When M3GAN came out three years ago, it was a meme-spawning hit: the homicidal robot, with its long hair and cutesy dress, was clearly designed to become a Halloween costume, and a clip of the sinister Model 3 Generative Android's dance routine went viral. All the director Gerard Johnstone had to do was deliver more of the same and he could have watched the money roll in. The glitch was that he decided not to deliver more of the same. While both films could be described as tongue-in-cheek science-fiction satires, M3GAN was a suburban slasher chiller, and the sequel was a sprawling, geopolitical action thriller. On its own terms, M3GAN 2.0 was terrific fun – but sometimes you have to give the people what they want. "We all thought M3GAN was like Superman. We could do anything to her," the film's producer, Jason Blum, said on The Town podcast. "We could change genres. We could put her in the summer. We could make her look different. We could turn her from a bad guy into a good guy. And we classically over-thought how powerful people's engagement really was with her."
10. The Smashing Machine: Dwayne Johnson has been one of the world's biggest film stars for over a decade, literally and figuratively, but there comes a time when every commercial colossus wants to prove that he or she can cut it as a serious dramatic actor, too. And so it was that The Rock made his bid for an Oscar – or at least an Oscar nomination – by starring in The Smashing Machine. All the signs were promising, in that Johnson had a prestigious co-star (Emily Blunt), a feted director (Benny Safdie, who made Good Time and Uncut Gems with his brother Josh), and a true story about a mixed martial artist battling with addictions. The trouble was that Johnson wasn't flexing many acting muscles that he hadn't flexed before: he was a charismatic wrestler playing a charismatic wrestler.
The only major difference from his previous work was that The Smashing Machine was depressing – and no one goes to see a film starring The Rock because they want to be depressed. Still, you can't help feeling sorry for the director. His brother made another sports biopic, Marty Supreme, starring Timothée Chalamet – and it's getting all the plaudits that didn't go to The Smashing Machine.
Comment
