It’s Summer. We’re all dealing with heat waves and fascism. Now is the time for Superman. James Gunn, the new creative head of DC Movies, seems to have cracked the code with Krypton’s finest, and a slew of positive reviews certainly didn’t hurt Warner Bros. and their biggest movie of 2025. Of course, being maybe the most famous superhero in American cultural history, and having not had a universally beloved film in quite some time, was probably a bigger motivation for audiences to get to the theatres. And they came out in droves.
Superman grossed $122 million from 4,135 theatres. That gives it the third biggest box office opening of 2025 so far, behind A Minecraft Movie and Lilo & Stitch. Internationally, numbers were a little softer than expected, but it still got to $217 million worldwide in its opening weekend. Warner Bros. did spend a lot on this one: a hefty $225 million budget and reported $100 million on marketing costs. But reviews were strong enough that I feel like this could have legs over the Summer, even as Marvel threatens to bang down the door with Fantastic Four. At the very least, a little bit of variety in our pricey superhero franchises is a good thing.
Understandably, we didn’t get any other big releases this past weekend. Really, we didn’t get any other releases aside from a couple of indie titles. Abraham’s Boys: A Dracula Story, a horror film based on a Joe Hill story, took in $130,013 from 470 locations. Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, a drama directed by Embeth ‘Miss Honey’ Davidtz, earned $36,000 from four places.
Lilo & Stitch jumped to the second spot in the list of 2025’s highest-grossing movies. It’s only $6 million away from $1 billion. But it’s never going to overtake the $2.2 billion earned by Ne Zha 2. A24 is gearing up to release the Chinese animated film with an English dub to give it a shot at American box office success. Frankly, I’m sceptical. I think it did well enough internationally with its subbed release, and I have no idea how they even sell this film to newbies. It’s a sequel, for one, and you really need to see the first one to get what’s going on. But hey, I do love Michelle Yeoh.
This coming week sees the release of a new Smurfs movie, Ari Aster’s COVID Western Eddington, and horror reboot I Know What You Did Last Summer.
You can check out the rest of the weekend box office numbers here.
