Hits, flops and scandals: Hollywood's 2025 midyear review by the numbers

Los Angeles Times

8 hours ago

No surprise, 2025 has been an eventful year so far in Hollywood.
In addition to the megahits and epic bombs at the box office, the entertainment industry has been roiled by chaotic forces.
The second Trump administration. The ongoing Blake Lively–Justin Baldoni legal saga. The federal trial of Sean 'Diddy' Combs, resulting in a mixed verdict in which the hip-hop mogul was acquitted of the most serious charges — racketeering and sex trafficking. And of course, the devastating wildfires that ravaged the Los Angeles area, particularly Pacific Palisades and Altadena, back in January.
But in terms of the actual business of movies, TV and streaming, there's plenty of serious stuff to dig into that could shape the future of entertainment — from streaming's continued ascent, to Disney and Universal's lawsuit against Midjourney, to the race for state tax credits to save California's beleaguered production economy.
Here's our Wide Shot midyear review, by the numbers.
The box office has been on a roller-coaster ride since the COVID-19 pandemic, with the release schedule feeling the effects of the industry's broader retrenchment. Although the 2023 strikes that thinned out the release schedule are in the rearview mirror, the uncertainty has very much continued.
After a brutal first quarter (ouch, 'Snow White'), sales have rebounded thanks to hits including 'Minecraft,' 'Sinners' and 'F1,' with grosses reaching $4.43 billion so far domestically, according to Comscore. That's up 15% from the same period last year, but still down 26% from 2019. Attendance is up 6.5% from 2024 with about 350 million tickets sold, according to Steve Buck at EntTelligence.
The challenges remain the same.
Studios struggle to draw crowds with much other than the biggest blockbusters and whatever they can convince Gen Z is an 'event' movie. And the films themselves are so expensive that even big numbers don't guarantee that an action spectacle with a robust audience will break even during its theatrical run. Even horror movies aren't really low-budget anymore (see 'Final Destination: Bloodlines' and '28 Years Later').
After years of shortened theatrical windows, audiences know they can wait to see a new movie at home, often after just a few weeks. That's why theater owners at the industry convention CinemaCon called on studios to commit to a longer standard gap between a movie's theatrical release and its availability for home viewing. Meanwhile, audiences face ever longer preshows, with ads now playing between the trailers at AMC. With so much debt, the chain sure needs the money.
The slate for the rest of the year is lumpy.
July is looking strong after 'Jurassic World Rebirth's' $147-million Fourth of July weekend opening, with Warner Bros. and DC's 'Superman' reboot, and Disney and Marvel's 'The Fantastic Four: First Steps' hoping to reinvigorate the superhero genre. Prerelease tracking for 'Superman' is all over the place, but an opening of $125 million is a fair target. 'Fantastic Four' is poised for a debut in the ballpark of $100 million. But August is lacking in obvious hits. Maybe Paramount's 'The Naked Gun' will bring pure comedy back — but we'll see.
Paramount caved, reaching a $16-million deal to settle President Trump's lawsuit over CBS News' '60 Minutes' interview with Kamala Harris. Trump declared victory over the 'Fake News media,' while 1st Amendment advocates and journalists howled, fuming that the owner of one of TV's most respected brands chose to buy peace rather than fight the case — widely considered frivolous — and stand up for press freedom.
There are still unanswered questions. In the aftermath of the deal, a source close to Trump's world said the president's team is also anticipating millions of dollars in airtime for PSAs related to MAGA-friendly causes and antisemitism — an alleged side deal that Trump himself referenced after the fact. Paramount said its deal with the Trump team did not include PSAs.
In any event, Paramount's leaders — not to mention its incoming owners at Skydance Media and RedBird — are eager to move on. David Ellison and Shari Redstone are now counting on the Federal Communications Commission to finally approve the $8-billion merger so they can get to work reshaping the storied entertainment firm.
Speaking of Paramount, one of the company's biggest franchises is causing headaches for the new owners — and vice versa — as the company wrangles with the creators of 'South Park' over the future of the long-running, foulmouthed cartoon.
Skydance balked at a proposed overall deal worth at least $2.5 billion for the 'South Park' guys, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, sources have said. (Their current $900-million deal is still in place.) Separately, the two sides are trying to work out the streaming rights to the show. Paramount wants to run the episodes on Paramount+, but it also wants to share the rights (and the costs) with another streamer — perhaps the 300-plus episodes' current home, HBO Max. The streaming rights are expected to fetch north of $200 million a year.
In Hollywood's current era of downsizing, Skydance may have legitimate reasons to not want to overpay for a show entering its 27th season. But Parker and Stone still have leverage: Without 'South Park,' the cupboard at Comedy Central is pretty bare.
Parker and Stone's lawyers have gone to the mat, accusing David Ellison's allies — namely former NBCUniversal boss and current RedBird executive Jeff Shell — of overstepping their authority in the negotiations. The 'South Park' team expressed its displeasure in a way only the makers of Cartman and Kenny could. After Comedy Central announced a delay for the new season premiere, the show's X profile tweeted a statement saying the Skydance deal was 'a s—show and is f— up South Park.'
Hollywood got its long-sought lifeline from Sacramento, as Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law a beefed-up film and television tax credit program, allocating $750 million annually for productions in the state.
That's more than double the previous program, which was capped at $330 million a year. Shortly afterward, the state legislature passed a law to increase the tax credit to as much as 35% of qualified expenditures for movies and TV series shot in the Greater Los Angeles area — and up to 40% for productions shot outside the region. It also expanded the types of productions that could qualify.
California currently provides a 20% to 25% tax credit to offset qualified production expenses, such as money spent on film crews and building sets. The plan does not cover above-the-line expenses, such as actor and director salaries, which remains a disadvantage as California tries to compete with other states and countries. New York and Texas are both ramping up their own incentive programs.
The Golden State's production economy has been devastated by competition. Boosting the tax incentives is one lever the state can pull to lure shoots back. There's also been a push to overhaul red tape at the local level in Los Angeles. Whatever good all this does, it's sure to be more effective than Trump's now-largely forgotten call for tariffs on movies produced abroad.
Streaming hit a major symbolic milestone earlier this year, as television usage for YouTube, Netflix and their brethren overtook broadcast and cable for the first time in May, according to Nielsen. Streaming services combined to attract 44.8% of all TV set viewing, representing the largest share to date for direct-to-consumer platforms. Viewership for linear networks was just behind at 44.2%.
Nielsen's regular viewership report — the Gauge — is a useful snapshot of the state of television today. Combined with the rapid decline of cable and satellite bundle subscriptions, the drop-off in viewing explains much of what's going on at the legacy media companies.
Firms including Disney and Paramount are still cutting hundreds of jobs to adjust to the new realities. Warner Bros. Discovery — which has been on a yearslong quest to reduce its heavy debt load — said it will split its operations in two, cleaving the studios and streaming business from its global networks. That decision followed NBCUniversal's move to spin off its cable nets into a new company called Versant.
Those plans are gambles. Cable networks are in decline, but they're profitable. For most media companies, streaming is growing but has only just gotten into the black after years of losing billions.
$417.5 million: Alcon Entertainment, the production company known for 'The Blind Side' and 'Blade Runner 2049,' gained a prized asset by acquiring the film library of bankrupt Village Roadshow. The $417.5-million deal gives the firm Village's stakes in movies including 'Joker' and 'Mad Max: Fury Road,' both released by Warner Bros. Village Roadshow declared bankruptcy amid a brutal legal battle with Warner Bros. over its release of 'The Matrix Resurrections,' which went to streaming and theaters at the same time.
$400 million: 'It Ends With Us' director Justin Baldoni's lawsuits against actress Blake Lively, her husband Ryan Reynolds, the New York Times and others were tossed last month, with a judge ruling that the claims — including defamation, extortion and breach of contract — failed to pass legal muster. U.S. District Judge Lewis J. Liman granted motions to dismiss both a $400-million countersuit against Lively, Reynolds and others and a $250-million defamation claim against The Times.
$2 billion: The biggest movie of the year isn't from Hollywood at all. It's 'Ne Zha 2,' an animated Chinese film that grossed more than $2 billion, the vast majority of which came from its home country. Despite trade wars and the dominance of local productions, though, U.S. movies can still do well in China. 'Jurassic World Rebirth' opened with $41.6 million there.
$20 million: Walt Disney Co. and Universal are suing AI firm Midjourney for allegedly ripping off and copying their intellectual property with its image-generating technology. With 150 violations cited in the lawsuit, at a statutory $150,000 per infringing item, that's a total of more than $20 million in potential damages.
$300 billion: The eye-popping valuation for privately held OpenAI, the San Francisco company behind ChatGPT and Sora.
$9.2 billion: The amount Disney ultimately paid for Comcast's Hulu stake, valuing the service at $27.6 billion. After a mediation process, Disney paid less for the stake than Comcast wanted.
— Times staff writers Meg James, Samantha Masunaga, Wendy Lee, Stephen Battaglio, Stacy Perman and Josh Rottenberg contributed to this article.
Listen: For your morning run, Killswitch Engage's 'This Consequence.'
Watch: I finally started 'Apple Cider Vinegar' over the weekend, and hoo boy, what a fascinating, infuriating story.