Spring 2025: When Originality Dominated Theaters
With the release of Sinners a week ago, many trade publications and box-office analysts praised the overperformance of the Ryan Coogler film as a win for originality, proof that audiences will flock to theaters for an original, imaginative film that takes chances and places trust in its audience. The success of Sinners is great for a number of reasons, of course, but one thing that’s been missing from the celebration is that, actually, many of the releases from the first four months of 2024 (everything pre-Summer movie season) were either fully original or were adapted from ideas that had not already been done to death. But with trades primarily focusing on how much the box office was compared to past years around this time, it was easy to forget that much of what came out of Hollywood these past few months was the breath of fresh air a lot of moviegoers say they’ve been looking for.
You wouldn’t recognize it from the two biggest hits of the season, of course, since the only two films to gross over $100 million (a number Sinners will likely clear in the coming weeks, of course) were Captain America: Brave New World and A Minecraft Movie. But aside from those two big exceptions and a small handful of others (mainly Snow White), a fresh and original film hit theaters almost every single week. The only downside is, compared to the massive numbers studios have become used to in the era of the mega-budget IP-driven blockbuster, it’s easy to look at the numbers alone and feel like moviegoing is in a bit of a slump at the moment. That was certainly the prevailing attitude when Novocaine, the nation’s #1 movie the weekend of March 14th, opened to $8.8 million, the lowest number-one film in the country since February 9th of last year.
But, in the opinion of this writer, that is the risk that movies will have to make from time to time if they want to find the next big phenomenon. Novocaine was a really fun action-packed comedy that delivered on combining traditional action movie tropes with a macabre sense of humor and charming romance. That same weekend, Steven Soderbergh released a slick new spy thriller Black Bag that may have been talky for some audiences but also provided lots of thrills and intrigue for others (hence why it had decent legs compared to the competition). And for family audiences, The Day The Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie was the funniest animated film in years, reviving classic characters everybody in America grew up watching while still retaining their charm in a modern context.
At a time when the theatrical experience is in a precarious position, we should be celebrating these movies’ originality and advising audiences to see them on a big screen with friends, not solely talking about the bottom line. Hearing something isn’t lighting the box office on fire isn’t going to convince people to run out and see a film, only hearing that a film is good or creating eye-catching promotions will get audiences out to theaters. And so, before Summer hits us with a new slate of exciting films that, in fairness, will mostly be based on existing IP, I think it’s worth looking back on some of the more original titles of Spring 2025 and shining a light on films that audiences might have missed.
January
The films from the Christmas movie season carried the exhibition industry over the first couple weeks of 2025, with only Den of Thieves 2 making a strong dent in the marketplace. But in the last few weeks of January, we got a number of really original titles that stood out to audiences. Presence, one of legendary filmmaker Steven Soderbergh’s more experimental titles, told a ghost story from the point-of-view of the ghost haunting a family’s new home in the suburbs. Such an oddball idea and execution would normally only be the realm of art-house theaters, but Soderbergh’s name as well as a few notable actors like Lucy Liu and Julia Fox convinced Neon to release the film wide, where it made back five times its budget and gave audiences the chance to see a style of film they might not normally check out.
As far as thrills go, the twisty sci-fi thriller Companion also surprised audiences with a funny and exciting storyline that most trailers for the film only hinted at. This mysterious marketing campaign led the film to a profit with solid word-of-mouth, and will hopefully convince more studios to put money behind more unpredictable horror movies. But beyond horror, the most surprise success of January was the raucous Sony comedy One Of Them Days, starring Keke Palmer and SZA in her acting debut. This film was specifically marketed as great to experience with a crowd or a group of your best friends, and its excellent reviews and word-of-mouth kept it in theaters for nearly two whole months after its release.
February
Much of the chatter about February was built around the release of both Captain America: Brave New World and Paddington in Peru on the 14th, but when you look past those two behemoth franchises, there were still plenty of options for moviegoers hungry for more quality, original titles. For instance, a week before the Valentine’s Day holiday, moviegoers across the country checked out Heart Eyes, a slasher rom-com from the team that’s brought such genre deconstructions like Happy Death Day and Werewolves Within to the big screen, with WOM being so strong that the film had an unprecedented gain in its second weekend (no doubt aided by couples looking for some kind of Valentine-related programming).
Horror continued to perform strongly later in the month, with the third biggest film of the month being Osgood Perkins’s The Monkey. This film was based on a relatively obscure Stephen King short story, but the combined name-brand recognition of King, Perkins, and producer James Wan was enough to propel the film’s stature among genre aficionados, aided by a hilariously macabre tongue-in-cheek marketing campaign. And for audiences who don’t like gore but loved being thrilled when they went to the movies, Focus Features released Last Breath wide at the end of February, based on a real-life mission where a group of deep-sea divers rescued a fellow diver stranded 100 meters underwater.
March
March came in roaring with one of the most interesting and unique blockbusters released by a studio in recent memory: Bong Joon-ho’s Mickey 17, starring Robert Pattinson. While some audiences didn’t know what to do with the complicated storyline and the film’s wildly divergent tones, most people who came out to theaters to see the film got on board and appreciated the film’s wild swings. The film was based on a popular novel, but unlike so many other famous adaptations, the film was already in development before the novel was even released, so it’s clear that the film’s originality came from director Bong Joon-ho’s desire to tell the story his way on a major scale.
As mentioned above, the middle of the month gave us a number of quality original titles that found a decent audience, but still deserve to be discovered by more moviegoers. Black Bag, in particular, had some of the best reviews of director Steven Soderbergh’s career and proved that you can still make entertaining, smart films for grown-ups that deserve to be seen on the big screen, especially when you get together as talented an ensemble cast as this film provided. The Day The Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie did very well for its complicated release history, but any audiences that haven’t checked it out yet should absolutely seek it out, as the beautiful 2D animation and classically cartoony sense of humor makes it one of the funniest films of 2025 so far. And after Disney released their long-gestating Snow White, other studios used the last week of the month to deliver a few different original films, such as the irreverent horror-comedy Death of a Unicorn and the more straightforward horror The Woman in the Yard.
April
April kicked off with the biggest movie of the year (by a wide margin), A Minecraft Movie. For a couple weeks, theaters were swarmed with legions of Minecraft fans, families taking their kids to the movies over Spring break, and hordes of teens waiting for the moment Jack Black says “Chicken jockey.” But looking beyond that phenomenon, audiences who wanted something not based on any existing IP still had plenty of good choices. Just the week after the release of Minecraft, A24 released the Alex Garland war film Warfare nationwide, giving audiences a real-time, you-are-there feeling to armed combat that few filmmakers have dared to attempt with this level of visceral sensation. That same day, Blumhouse and director Christopher Landon released the Hitchcockian-style thriller Drop, all about a woman who is given an ultimatum on her first date by an unknown killer: Poison her date or her son dies. This film received some of the best reviews Blumhouse has gotten in years, and continued their trend of delivering solid thrills to theaters with a small-to-mid budget that makes exhibitors and studios happy.
Of course, no discussion of original filmmaking would be complete without mentioning the runaway success of Ryan Coogler’s Sinners. At the time of publishing this blog, Sinners had an unprecedented -6% drop in its second weekend, one of the only times a drop that small has ever occurred on a non-holiday weekend. Before its release, various outlets reported on the film’s budget, period setting, violent content, and R rating as if it was a risk, but the gambit paid off and proved, once again, that few things have the kind of staying power at the box office as a fully original, surprising new film. Sinners features that quality that some of the most popular blockbusters of all time share: It feels wholly original but is made up of a number of familiar parts. It doesn’t alienate audiences by extending beyond what people know they like, but it also presents the traditional tropes and plot devices in a wholly new context, and as such, it gives people something to talk about when they leave the theater. There’s also something to be said for giving audiences the most value for their dollar; Sinners is a period drama, a love story, a gangster film, a musical, and a horror film all in one. And while most audiences might not realize the wildly different tones and genres while they’re watching it, they certainly will feel like they got their money’s worth when they leave the theater.
The success of Sinners proves something about moviegoing that a lot of studios and exhibitors will sometimes doubt: There IS value in originality, as long as the films are marketed well and deliver proper thrills that audiences look for when they come to the movies. And when they’re designed and sold to audiences as something that needs to be seen on the big screen, as in the case of Sinners, then people will show up so long as theaters give films the time to find their audience. Spring 2025 might not have had the most exciting box office results of the last few years, but they did prove that Hollywood is willing to put money into the production of quality original films. Hopefully, with the enormous success of Sinners, we will continue to see more originality in the future.