The 2025 summer movie season has come to a close and it’s been an odd few months that reflect the unstable realities of Hollywood cinema and the theatrical marketplace.
2025 marks the fiftieth anniversary of what we recognize as the start of the summer movie season which began in 1975 with the release of Jaws and its unprecedented box office success. In the decades that followed, the summer was associated with escapist, feel-good fare that drew huge crowds. Some of the movies were loud and dumb such as Independence Day, Armageddon, and Transformers but there was also room for films such as Forrest Gump, Ghost, Back to the Future, and The Karate Kid. Summer movie seasons also typically saw the assent of a title that captured the cultural zeitgeist as seen in Star Wars, Top Gun, and Barbie.
There was no definitive summer movie in 2025. There were successes to be sure. Disney’s live action remake of Lilo & Stitch topped the summer box office, and it was the only release of this summer to make over $1 billion worldwide. Other top performers of the summer include Superman, Jurassic World: Rebirth, The Fantastic Four: First Steps, and the remake of How to Train Your Dragon.
But box office isn’t the whole story. A lot of these films came and went. Few left any cultural mark. Superman got embroiled in a political conflict but that didn’t seem to impact its box office one way or another.
Two films did achieve cultural traction. KPop Demon Hunters debuted on Netflix and became one of the streamer’s most watched movies. The soundtrack had several hits on the Billboard Hot 100 and singalong events at theaters played to sellout crowds. The other summer release that’s made a cultural mark is the surprise horror hit Weapons which has continued to top the box office while inciting excited chatter among viewers.
That excitement is exactly what’s missing from this summer’s movies. Weapons is the kind of film friends and coworkers tell each other about, a film that was distinct and unusual in the cinema marketplace, that showed mainstream audiences what they were missing, that felt relevant to this moment. It demanded to be seen.
Summer is the season of spectacle but there’s nothing much spectacular about leftovers. Hollywood studios are playing it safe and keep giving us more of the same. Of the top twenty grossers so far in 2025, fifteen are either a sequel, a remake, or part of an ongoing film franchise. And many of these franchises go back over a decade. These movies can’t connect to the zeitgeist because they are disconnected from it.
That observation isn’t exactly new but it’s hard to remember a summer when there wasn’t a defining movie release. But this coincides with a year in which there was no “song of the summer.” Even television, which has reliably created water cooler topics in recent years, hasn’t generated a series that has transcended the culture. Maybe the closest we came this summer was the Coldplay kiss cam incident. This all suggests that the entertainment industry is not functioning as a cultural adhesive, linking us in a shared experience.
That’s not necessarily bad but it does mean that art and entertainment are missing one of their key qualities: speaking cross-culturally and to the moment. To put it another way, the movies are not relevant.
The disconnect between cinema and viewers is about content but it’s also about marking. When Jaws was released in 1975 it was the first example of a studio saturating television with ads and the film opened nationwide rather than working its way through geographic markets. That release strategy hasn’t changed much in fifty years but with the decline of linear television, audiences are not seeing ads nor are they being exposed to promo appearances on daytime and late night talk shows. As a result, movies get dumped into theaters and no one knows what they are, that they’ve opened, or that these films even exist.
But there were a few great movies released this summer, many of them probably unseen by and unknown to a lot of the pubic. Here are some of the highlights:
Thrillers
There were several adult-oriented thrillers released this summer, among them Americana, in which several groups of people race to recover a stolen Lakota ghost shirt. Americana is violent but also darkly funny.
Eden was based on true events in which a group of people settle on an otherwise uninhabited island. Thoughtful and entertaining, Eden was filmmaker Ron Howard’s best movie in over a decade.
Ari Aster released Eddington, a COVID-19 story that was partly a drama and a black comedy. The film might be a little too soon for some of us who lived through the pandemic but in years to come Eddington may be the movie that we use to explain what that period was like.
Comedies
The comedy genre is thin right now but there were a few notable films. Freakier Friday, the sequel to the 2003 film, was a lot of fun and ought to play for both young moviegoers and their parents.
The summer had a few offbeat and dark comedies. Oh, Hi! was a well acted dramedy in which a couple travels to an isolated cabin for a weekend getaway and faces a crisis in their relationship. Friendship starred Tim Robinson as a suburbanite who develops an unhealthy relationship with his neighbor, played by Paul Rudd.
On the sillier side, The Naked Gun remake was good fun.
Horror
Weapons was the horror hit of the season and rightly so but there were a few other notable horror pictures released this summer including Dangerous Animals, which put a fresh spin on the killer shark genre.
Together stars Dave Franco and Alison Brie as a longtime couple who encounters a curse that makes their bodies fuse together.
Bring Her Back is an exceptional horror film from Danny Philippou and Michael Philippou. It’s a devastating movie about grief with a great cast, especially Sally Hawkins.
Drama
Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight is based on the memoir by Alexandra Fuller. In 1980 Zimbabwe Rhodesia, a family of white British farmers await the outcome of the election following the end of that country’s civil war. This is an exceptional historical drama that suggests challenging questions about identity, home, and power.
Sorry, Baby was written, directed by, and stars Eva Victor as a scholar who has become an English professor at her alma mater following an assault by her thesis advisor. It’s an impressively told story that navigates difficult subject matter with humor and empathy.
She Rides Shotgun is a neo-western in the spirit of Hell or High Water. A father and his estranged daughter go on the run, fleeing a drug kingpin. It’s exciting and brutal and ought to be more widely appreciated.