Fifty years ago at the American box office, “Jaws” was the highest-grossing movie of the year, and the Top 10 included a number of other classics, including “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” “Shampoo,” “Dog Day Afternoon” and “Three Days of the Condor.” There were only two sequels on the chart: “The Return of the Pink Panther” and “”Funny Lady.”
The number of sequels, prequels, remakes, franchise films, etc., in the Top 10 has increased through the years, from three in 1985 and 1995 to six in 2005 to seven in 2015.
Now let’s take a look at the 14 biggest commercial hits from last year:
- “Inside Out 2”
- “Deadpool & Wolverine”
- “Wicked”
- “Moana 2”
- “Despicable Me 4”
- “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice”
- “Dune: Part Two”
- “Twisters”
- “Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire”
- “Kung Fu Panda 4″
- “Bad Boys: Ride or Die”
- “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes”
- “Gladiator II”
- “Sonic the Hedgehog 3”
Twelve of those films were sequels and/or part of a franchise. “Twisters,” meanwhile, was considered a “standalone sequel,” while “Wicked,” drawn from a novel and a stage musical, owed its existence to the 1939 classic “The Wizard of Oz.”
I think it’s safe to say we’ll never return to the 1975 template where 80% of the top performers were original films.
This is not to say I’m not psyched about a whole boatload of next-chapter films coming our way in 2025, from “Captain America: Brave New World” to “The Accountant 2,” from “Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part Two” to “M3GAN 2.0,” and let’s not forget “Freakier Friday,” “Nobody 2,” “Downton Abbey 3,” “The Black Phone 2,” “Zootopia 2,” “Avatar: Fire and Ash” and yes, “Wicked: For Good.”
The good news is, we’re also getting some very promising original films this year. Ready?
‘The Gorge’ (Feb. 14)
Scott Derrickson directed one of the best supernatural horror movies of the 2000s in “The Exorcism of Emily Rose,” and one of the best supernatural horror movies of the 2020s to date in “Black Phone.” (I wish the “Black Phone” sequel coming out this year was titled “White Phone,” but I’m still keen to see it.) In “The Gorge,” we get the electric casting of Anya Taylor-Joy and Miles Teller as elite snipers who have been assigned to guard a vast and highly classified and supposedly impenetrable gorge known as “The Door to Hell,” so it’s definitely NOT a tourist attraction. Sigourney Weaver co-stars, and whenever the s- – – is about to hit the fan, you want Sigourney Weaver around.
‘Mickey 17′ (March 7)
Five years after Bong Joon-ho’s “Parasite” won four major Academy Awards including best picture, director, original screenplay and international feature film, the writer-director adapts Edward Ashton’s sci-fi novel about a space colonist who is replaced by a clone every time he dies. Robert Pattinson stars as the multiple Mickeys, with a supporting cast that includes Naomi Ackie, Steven Yeun, Toni Collette and Mark Ruffalo.
‘Black Bag’ (March 14)
Director Steven Soderbergh and screenwriter David Koepp have just gifted us with the supernatural set piece “Presence,” currently playing in theaters — and they’ve re-teamed for “Black Bag,” which sounds like a darker and heavier take on “Mr. and Mrs. Smith.” Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender play married intelligence agents whose loyalties are tested when one of them is suspected of betraying her country. What with the David Fincher movie “The Killer” and the TV series “The Agency” and now “Black Bag,” that Fassbender fellow is making a specialty of playing deadly operatives on one side of the law or the other!
‘Sinners’ (April 18)
The greatly talented writer-director Ryan Coogler (“Fruitvale Station,” “Creed,” “Black Panther”) is the creative force behind this horror film with Michael B. Jordan in a dual role as twin brothers who return to their hometown in the Jim Crow-era South of the 1930s and confront something evil and sinister — something demonic, possibly even vampiric. The supporting cast includes Hailee Steinfeld, Jack O’Connell, Wunmi Mosaku, Omar Benson Miller and Delroy Lindo, and you can never go wrong with Delroy Lindo.
‘A Big Bold Beautiful Journey’ (May 9)
You gotta love a movie title that tells you what the movie is about. Over the last decade and a half, the filmmaker Kogonada has constructed a series of video essays on acclaimed works and directors, from “Breaking Bad: POV” (an ice-cool montage of point-of-view shots from the series, set to “Move” by Jonathan Elias) to “Quentin Tarantino: From Below” to “Linklater: On Cinema & Time” to “Eyes of Hitchcock.” Kogonada also directed four episodes of the great series “Pachinko,” as well as the underrated feature “After Yang” in 2021. Now comes “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey,” starring Margot Robbie and Colin Farrell as two strangers who meet under unusual circumstances and embark on …
Well. We’ll just have to see.
Untitled Paul Thomas Anderson Film (Aug. 8)
Listen, when they haven’t even settled on a title yet, you know a project is going to be shrouded in secrecy, but what we do know is this is the latest film from the man who has given us “Boogie Nights,” “There Will Be Blood,” “The Master,” “Phantom Thread” and “Licorice Pizza,” for crying out loud, and the ridiculous cast includes Leonardo DiCaprio, Regina Hall, Sean Penn and Benicio del Toro. This is PTA’s most expensive movie ever, by far, with a budget somewhere near $150 million, and it may or may not be an interpretation of Thomas Pynchon’s novel “Vineland,” which was set in California during Ronald Reagan’s reelection in 1984. Whatever the subject matter, I hope they keep calling it “Untitled Paul Thomas Anderson Film.” That would look awesome on theater marquees.
‘Bugonia’ (Nov. 7)
That wild and crazy genius Yorgos Lanthimos (“The Favourite,” “Poor Things,” “Kinds of Kindness”) once again teams up with Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons for this sci-fi comedy remake of the 2003 South Korean film “Save the Green Planet!” Plemons is a conspiracy theorist who is part of a duo that kidnaps Stone’s pharma company CEO because he believes she’s an alien who is trying to destroy the planet. Yep, that old story again.
‘The Housemaid’ (Dec. 25)
Paul Feig (“Bridesmaids,” “A Simple Favor”) directs this adaptation of Freida McFadden’s popular psychological thriller, with Sydney Sweeney as the titular character, who gets a job working for a wealthy couple (Amanda Seyfried and Brandon Sklenar) who are harboring some dark secrets. I mean, what other kinds of secrets do you harbor? Certainly not light ones! This could be the beginning of a franchise, given McFadden has penned sequels titled “The Housemaid’s Secret,” “The Housemaid’s Wedding” and “The Housemaid Is Watching.” (Sidebar: “Freida McFadden” is the pen name for the author, who is also a practicing physician specializing in brain injuries. Impressive.)
“Deliver Me From Nowhere” (date TBD)
The writer-director Scott Hooper might not be a household name, but he has proved to be one of the most versatile and consistently excellent filmmakers of the last decade and a half, with credits including “Crazy Heart,” “Out of the Furnace,” “Hostiles,” “Antlers” and “The Pale Blue Eye.” (Christian Bale starred in three of those films, and we know Christian Bale isn’t going to be trifling around with medium talents.) “Deliver Me from Nowhere” is a biopic about the making of Bruce Springsteen’s 1982 album “Nebraska,” with Jeremy Allen White as the Boss and get this, Jeremy Strong as Jon Landau, the longtime manager and producer.
‘Frankenstein’ (date TBD)
All right, so we’re making room for ONE film on our list that is indeed a re-imagination of sorts — but it’s the one and only Guillermo del Toro who is interpreting Mary Shelley’s 1818 classic “Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus.” The always terrific Oscar Isaac is Victor Frankenstein, while Jacob Elordi is Frankenstein’s creation. For more than two decades, del Toro has contemplated making a Frankenstein movie. Now, and finally, it’s alive.