It's 1990.
Disney is convinced Dick Tracy will become the Mouse House's biggest box office hit of the year. How could it not? It combined legendary actor Warren Beatty (and all the nostalgia for his 60s/70s hits) with a famous comic book character. 1989's Batman needed to watch its back. However, the box office victor for Disney that year was another Touchstone Pictures release: Pretty Woman. A low-budget romantic-comedy released in March (NOT summertime) and relying on fresh-faced movie star Julia Roberts, Pretty Woman made $178 million domestically and left Dick Tracy in the dust financially.
Let's go forward to 2002.
Do you think any studio executive imagined that Men in Black II, Austin Powers in Goldmember, Die Another Day, or Red Dragon would make significantly less at the box office than My Big Fat Greek Wedding? That indie rom-com started off small in limited release, but kept on drawing crowds to theaters for months on end. It was the fifth-biggest movie of 2002 in North America.
It's 1967. The Graduate, a tiny low-budget film starring then-unknown Dustin Hoffman, is the number one movie of the year. It does circles around vastly costlier musicals like Thoroughly Modern Millie and Camelot. Two years later, Easy Rider, with a $400,000 budget, outgrossed the $25 million-budgeted Hello, Dolly! That was despite the former film having no pre-existing source material to its name.
Fatal Attraction outgrossing Beverly Hills Cop II. Speed outgrossing Clear and Present Danger. Crazy Rich Asians outgrossing Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, Bumblebee, and Mary Poppins Returns. Every year brings new examples of how you can't predict what will become popular in the world of film. It's wonderfully exciting. It also makes the norms of Hollywood extras frustrating. Such standards were more pervasive and infuriating than ever in the year 2025.
For decades, Hollywood's grown increasingly reliant on pre-existing brand names to carry the day. A penchant that was already prominent in the 80s has become omnipresent today. Increased competition for people's eyeballs and corporate consolidation (not to mention a greater emphasis on pleasing stockholders above all others) has led to everything being franchises and IP-driven. Studio executives keep getting heftier and heftier paychecks while insisting there's no money to take a chance on original projects in realms like animated family films, comedies, teen-skewing features, and more. All the while, evidence keeps piling up at your local multiplex that general audiences crave something new.
Sinners, Weapons, Marty Supreme, The Housemaid, these were all non-sequels (three weren't based on any pre-existing material), and they all made more than Tron: Ares, Ballerina, Now You See Me, Now You Don't, and countless other 2025 movies reviving pre-2020 brand names. Even A Minecraft Movie, a piece of traditional IP blockbuster filmmaking aimed at today's kids rather than 80s nostalgia, reflects the essentiality of embracing concepts that haven't been brought to the silver screen before. Nobody can predict anything in this business, even if the Silicon Valley overlords crave algorithms and terrifying levels of control that can "seemingly" eliminate unpredictability.
Even on television, the uncertainty over what will connect with the public is apparent. Did anyone at HBO think the second Peacemaker season would get significantly less pop culture traction than Heated Rivalry, a hockey show they just acquired for U.S. release? This small program was a massive sleeper hit and left countless bigger-budgeted 2020s TV shows tied to big-name stars and brand names in the dust. People were much more curious about a hockey program unlike anything they'd ever seen than Monarch: Legacy of Monsters.
Returning to films, it's worth pointing out that One Battle After Another is up to $133 million at the international box office. That's a sum only $59 million behind the foreign box office total of Thunderbolts*, which both cost more to make and was a traditional PG-13 superhero movie sequel. Meanwhile, there's a good chance Weapons outgrossed Five Nights at Freddy's 2 globally. Looking at the global film scene, the Japanese film Kokuho (based on the Shuichi Yoshida novel of the same name) has broken box office records in its home country. Its $119.64 million worldwide gross is ahead of sequels like The Accountant 2 and Karate Kid: Legends. Then, of course, there's sequel Ne Zha 2, which provided its own kind of surprise in topping the worldwide box office for 2025 with $2.15 billion. Who could have ever expected a film outside of America to gross this much?
All this uncertainty should inspire Hollywood studios to realize that no brand name (unless it's Zootopia) guarantees a box office hit. Do not rely on old and tired franchises to provide "security." That way only produces I Know What You Did Last Summer, Snow White, and M3gan 2.0. If nothing is certain, why not embrace that reality and provide steady doses of original, unexpected filmmaking? Sinners, Weapons, and shouldn't be exceptions. They should be norms and golden stars for an American film industry currently stewing over how to turn Labubu's and Hot Wheels into major motion pictures.
Even indie studio A24 learned it's always the unexpected titles that strike most effectively the hard way in its 2025 cinematic exploits. Its costly The Smashing Machine movie, reuniting Dwayne Johnson and Emily Blunt from an earlier Disney blockbuster, made less domestically than Friendship, a low-budget title A24 acquired out of the Toronto International Film Festival in 2024. In this specific case, newbie cinema leading man Tim Robinson was more appealing to audiences than Dwayne Johnson. Could A24 executives also have imagined that a 215-minute drama like The Brutalist would make more than a mainstream-friendly title like The Death of a Unicorn?
Studios big and small are constantly learning how unpredictable the world of art is. That might sound like a weird thing to say while the biggest movies in the world are Zootopia and Avatar sequels. Just ask The Running Man, Tron: Ares, M3gan 2.0, and Joker: Folie a Deux...those brand names are the pronounced exceptions, not the rule. While those two dominate multiplexes, The Housemaid and Marty Supreme are also tearing it up financially. These R-rated projects are proving adults will come out to theaters for productions that aren't intertwined with long-standing brand names.
Give people something new, and especially give young people projects and concepts that can belong to them (rather than trying to make them care about Kevin Costner westerns or Julia Roberts campus thrillers)...the possibilities are endless. Heated Rivalry, Sinners, Marty Supreme, Weapons, these are the 2025 pop culture properties that reaffirm a hunger from movie and TV audiences for something they haven't seen before. This is the kind of reality that's bound to make algorithm/A.I.-driven executives sweat profusely. For the rest of us, this is an exciting demonstration that the next pop culture phenomenon can come from anywhere.
This practice thrived in 1990, 1967, 2002, and so many other years of artistic history. Despite COVID-19, streaming, corporate executive indifference to artists and movie theaters, the unexpected breaking out and surpassing the "surefire" hits has endured into 2025. If that isn't enough to give one some hope for 2026, I don't know what will.
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