Hollywood’s Biggest Winners and Losers of 2025

The streamer continues to win on all fronts. Subscribers topped 300 million globally. Revenue was up 16 percent. Netflix is likely buying Warner Bros.? Plus: Hits like KPop Demon Hunters and the final season of Stranger Things, while limited series Adolescence swept at the Emmys. Sure, Adolescence was made by the Brits, but at least Netflix was smart enough to buy it instead of wasting millions on a sequel to The Electric State, or trying to find new ways to make The Witcher fans happy.

Where to start? Every movie Paramount released this year (greenlit under the company’s previous regime) lost money except one (the low-budget sleeper Regretting You). Paramount is — as of this writing, at least — losing its supposedly unbeatable Trump-protected bid to acquire Warner Bros. Amid talent-draining mass layoffs, Paramount also lost Taylor Sheridan, who has made 12 hits in a row, but dug deep to poach Stranger Things showrunners The Duffer Brothers (who have made one hit in a row). The new regime did bring in Jon M. Chu and James Mangold, however, both amid competitive situations. Now streamer Paramount+ is raising its subscription price — not because their offerings deserve it, but because they desperately need it. 

Imagine you manage a Taco Bell and your store has such a tough time making Nachos Belgrandes and Crunchwrap Supremes that it falls $11 billion into debt. You keep changing the name of your products (Chalupa Supreme Max?) and that only makes things worse. Then Netflix offers to buy your Taco Bell and acquire your debt, earning you a $567 million payday. Most of us working stiffs can only dream of failing upward on such a massively lucrative scale! Zaslav’s gutting-and-rebuilding wins — largely in the areas of cost cutting and consolidation — are things Wall Street likes, at least. The Warner Bros. Discovery President and CEO can sulk over this sarcasm while in the Med on his new megayacht.

These two sure weren’t boring. But they were — and somehow still are! — locked in mutually assured destruction. It’s like watching a social and legal death spiral where everybody who got sucked into two people’s orbit ended up looking worse and nobody has actually gained anything — except for the lawyers and those of us texting popcorn emojis every time another story broke about their feud. How bad was it? It Ends with Us author Colleen Hoover recently said she’s now “embarrassed” by her own book. 

When everybody in the town just knows you’re going to be fired, then you start pumping out one hit after another with A Minecraft Movie, Sinners and Weapons (nine of the studio’s films debuted at No. 1 at the global box office this year). The Warner Bros. movie chiefs must have been able to hear industry insiders slamming on their brakes and looping around on the 405 to rush back to Burbank and bend the knee after pulling off this one. 

Speaking of Sinners and Weapons, Coogler’s wildly entertaining and original take on the vampire genre seemed to single-handedly prove that non-IP titles can still make a big splash — and established yet again that he’s a uniquely talented filmmaker. And just in case anybody thought Sinners might be a box office one-off, along came Cregger’s literate and twisty Weapons.

The sci-fi franchise is approaching 60 years old and sure feels like it. Paramount+’s Section 31 movie tanked (a 16 percent audience score on Rotten Tomatoes). The third season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds was meh (dropping sharply from prior seasons to a 53 percent audience score). The only person who sounds excited for the upcoming Gen Z-targeted Starfleet Academy is recurring guest star Paul Giamatti (one wag on YouTube wrote the show’s trailer looked like “TikTok space prom”). Sure, a new Trek movie is in the works (from the writer-directors of Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves), but c’mon, do you care? 

“Before you kill me, I just want to say: Your tits look great in that little tiny bra” — this is an accurate example of the dialogue on Landman, yet mega-producer Taylor Sheridan made a deal that could earn up to $1 billion when he jumped ship from Paramount to Universal. He never needs to go into an office. Hell, he never needs to leave his ranch. It doesn’t matter if his shows win awards or if critics like them. Sheridan just might be the luckiest son of gun in Hollywood, but it doesn’t mean he’s not talented.  

After years of audience drain, major awards shows halted their ratings slides and largely rebounded. The Emmys hit a four-year high. The Oscars hit a five-year high. The Tony Awards hit a six-year high. The Golden Globes held steady, but the production unearthed a tough-to-find asset: A host (Nikki Glaser) who drew universally positive reviews and is willing to return for at least another year. (Obligatory disclosure that THR owner PMC also co-owns the Globes). 

The backlash against Sweeney’s American Eagle ad was dumb. But having the TikTok hordes insist you’re racist for months isn’t a great look, even if you otherwise show up to movie premieres looking great. And speaking of those, Sweeney had three movies that flopped (Americana, Echo Valley, and Christy). Yes, they were low-expectation indie titles, but each had Sweeney’s chronically online detractors cheering their downfall. The Housemaid is tracking to be a solid opening, at least. Sweeney is clearly a star, but some years you kinda lose whether it’s fair or not. 

The perpetual “three month free trial” streaming service actually had more than one show that people were excited about this year, with season two of Severance and season four of The Morning Show getting buzz. The real highlight is the debut of the most original alien invasion concept in years – and Apple’s biggest hit ever: Pluribus, a show where one person can have anything they want in the world and they still never stop complaining (which might explain Elon Musk). Moreover, Apple TV+ finally seems to know it is: smart TV for smart people who think they’re smart. 

Last year was widely declared “the summer of Glen Powell” since the grinning charmer from Top Gun: Maverick had so many big projects coming out. This year was more like the, uh, bummer of Glen Powell (hey, you try writing these). The Running Man was supposed to prove that Powell can be a solo-lead action star. His TV show Chad Powers was the actor’s “it’s not Ted Lasso but maybe it can be popular like Ted Lasso?” sports comedy effort. Both disappointed. As for Jared Leto, there’s probably a lot of reasons Tron: Ares bombed, but the only one everybody seemed to agree on was Jared Leto. 

Superman did what it needed to do at the box office — and not much more. Still, Gunn’s new Man of Steel beat out three efforts by Marvel (ranked from modestly entertaining to sloppy to unwatchable: Thunderbolts, Fantastic Four: First Steps, Captain America: Brave New World). Season two of Gunn’s HBO series Peacemaker was also considered better than Marvel’s recent Disney+ efforts (until its finale, at least). So this year was a genuine win for Gunn (sorry Snyder-nerds!). In the meantime, the DC Studios co-chief is being paid a ton of money to do exactly what he wants — make his dream comic book projects and cast his friends. Supergirl looks pretty shaky in that teaser trailer, but that’s next year’s problem.

It was supposed to be an unprecedented year for quality adaptations of the beloved horror author’s works. But The Life of Chuck, The Long Walk, and The Running Man all underperformed. What’s frustrating is that none of these movies were actually bad (and The Long Walk was pretty great). HBO’s It: Welcome to Derry was fairly well received, at least, and fans are currently waiting to find out if King’s killer clown will get a renewal. As for the author himself, the 77 year old has been struggling with his health lately, so let’s hope he improves. A world without any more King novels and short stories would be a huge loss for us all. 

Has South Park become too reactive and political? Maybe (one wonders if anybody is going to remember who Trump administration officials like Pete Hegseth or Kristi Noem are when watching reruns in the coming years). But the show’s 27th season drew its biggest audience in decades for fearlessly skewering the president in a brutally vulgar way that only South Park can get away with (Jimmy Kimmel can bemoan Trump all he wants, but, for better or worse, the man is never going to go on TV and call president a “r——d f—–t”). Plus, creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone signed a new five-year $1.5 billion deal with Paramount Global to continue mocking whatever they want — even their own parent company.

For the last few years, prestige biopics were clearly working. So Hollywood made a bunch of them. You’ll never guess what happened next. Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, Christy, Blue Moon, and The Smashing Machine performed poorly. A Complete Unknown (released last December) did well, but does anybody want to bet that a Bob Dylan biopic would not have made $40 million — let alone $140 million — without Timothée Chalamet? Next up is Lionsgate’s Michael Jackson biopic, an early contender for 2026’s most awkward publicity tour. 

Sure, Disney crushed… again… this time closing in on collective $6 billion in global box office, led by Zootopia 2 and Lilo & Stitch and the newest? last? latest? final? Avatar movie coming in hot. But let’s cheer the underdog which had a strong showing: Universal enjoyed some hefty box office (Jurassic World Rebirth, How to Train Your Dragon and Wicked: For Good), its Universal Epic Universe theme park was a surprisingly formidable launch (helping crater the struggling Six Flags), and NBCUniversal Entertainment Chairman Donna Langley poached Taylor Sheridan to juice its womp-womp Peacock streaming service. Sure, Universal had some bombs — Megan 2.0 somehow made significantly less at the box office than a one-week re-release of Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith. But Langley continued to prove she knows how to steer this ship. 

Netflix insists on dropping every episode of a new TV season on the same day — except when they don’t. This year, in particular, popular shows like Wednesday, Cobra Kai, Bridgerton, Stranger Things, and, heck, even Love Is Blind had a staggered release schedule. So what do those exceptions say to Hollywood? They say: Regardless of what we claim, we know dumping all your episodes at once isn’t the best way to maximize a show’s engagement and generate conversation. Which is why every other streamer — that have otherwise ripped off Netflix’s model — still releases new episodes weekly. Pluribus and The Pitt are ideal examples of recent shows that gradually built buzz with a slow rollout. The more Netflix makes exceptions to their rule, the more binge-dumped shows look like they’re just getting, well, dumped. 

Trump tried to cancel Jimmy Kimmel. Instead, the president’s efforts made the ABC host a First Amendment hero after his brief suspension, and Kimmel secured a contract renewal (hey, one year is better than none). Colbert’s The Late Show did get canceled (ending in May) — and, yeah, Trump probably played a role there, at least in the timing. But CBS’s decision only made the media and fans love Colbert more than ever (and finally earned The Late Show the Emmy for best talk series). This is a blaze-of-glory exit for Colbert from a gig that nobody should want to keep doing into their 60s anyway. 

It’s odd to put a single film on this list, but Snow White managed to encapsulate so many things that audiences openly dislike, all in one movie: IP that doesn’t honor its source material. Entitled-sounding actors (star Rachel Zegler will next appear in … in … um …). Dreadful special effects. A fix-it-as-we-go production followed by reshoots. Progressive politics — or any politics, really – taking the wheel on a family-friendly project. Snow White underperformed so much it also canceled a planned live-action remake of Tangled for a few months — until Lilo & Stitch made $1 billion and Disney thought, “This time will be different; now let’s give Rapunzel a pixie cut.”

Google’s media monster is gradually devouring the television business. Snatching the rights to air the Academy Awards off ABC’s plate is just its latest snack. YouTube also gobbled NFL Sunday Ticket and this year became the biggest podcast platform, with revenue topping $50 billion. Even Tom Brady launched a YouTube channel. We’re only a few years from an Alien: Earth world where YouTube and Netflix become our Weyland-Yutani. 

Has there ever been a new technological wonder that so many people actively disliked? AI is winning. Disney caving and licensing its characters to OpenAI was a major crack in the dam. AI influencers are raking in millions on Instagram. The AI-fueled bubble on Wall Street continues. In Hollywood, AI is being used for things like script analysis, storyboards, editing, VFX cleanup — and who knows how many story twists and lines of dialogue in TV shows were quietly first suggested behind the scenes by ChatGPT (probably not “your tits look great in that little tiny bra” — that line passes the Turing Test with flying colors). Yet Merriam-Webster’s word of the year was “slop” — as in, AI slop, which is helping the enshittification (Macquarie Dictionary’s 2024 word of the year) of all digital content. Meanwhile, an AI actress named Tilly left human actors freaked out and threatened by her lack of soul, eternal youth, and her studio-friendly willingness to not post about Israel on Instagram. AI is the thing that nobody seems to want, yet everybody is already using.

This year we achieved peak Pedro Pascal saturation. In addition to making HBO’s The Last of Us fans weep (and then quit watching), Pascal starred in Eddington, Materialists and The Fantastic Four: First Steps. Pascal became so ubiquitous that a viral post showed a movie theater lobby displaying posters for three different Pascal films at the same time. A runner-up: Ayo Edebiri, who also had an Emmy acclaimed TV performance (The Bear) and three films (Opus, After the Hunt, Ella McCay and I Love L.A.), even if they didn’t really pop.