Top 10 Lists

The movies are thriving. It’s the movie business that’s in trouble.

Just ask Warner Bros. The two wolves of art and finance have long battled for cinema’s soul, but rarely has a major studio had a better year critically and commercially than WB in 2025. It cranked out three huge hits—Sinners, F1, and Weapons—that also happened to be well-regarded original productions. Two of those landed Best Picture nominations, and Sinners is essentially the Oscars’ co-favorite alongside One Battle After Another—another Warner property. The company also did well on the IP front, delivering a smash-hit videogame adaptation that wasn’t entirely soulless (A Minecraft Movie), a solid superhero flick (Superman), and a diverting sequel to an enduring horror franchise (Final Destination Bloodlines). (There was also another lucrative Conjuring film in the mix, which, whatever.) So what happened next? David Zaslav, the corporation’s president/hatchet man, responded to such prosperity just as you’d expect: He put the studio up for sale.

The fight to acquire Warner Bros. and its stockpile of assets seems designed to evoke the tagline to Alien vs. Predator. In one corner is Netflix, the streaming “disruptor” that views theatrical exhibition as an existential threat to its preferred conception of movie-watching: hitting “Play” on whatever title your algorithm recommends so you can have some background noise while you’re doing the dishes. In the other is Paramount, the legacy studio owned by a right-wing billionaire whose primary focus seems to be reshaping his TV network such that it never says anything that might hurt the feelings of the notoriously fickle Trump administration. Neither scenario promises a vibrant outlook for American moviegoing, much less the possibility of a theatrical slate as rich and varied as the one Warner Bros. put out last year. Read More

For critics, every year-end review of the movies is an exercise in both celebration and consternation. We praise the art form and also lament its inexorable degradation. We highlight our favorites while bemoaning that they didn’t make enough money. We applaud the industry’s democratization and kvetch about studios’ entrenched homogeneity. We rhapsodize about the stuff we adore and snarl that there’s so much else to despise. We write about what’s good and still find a way to feel bad.

And look, I get it. It’s hard not to survey the medium’s financial landscape without shuddering in despair; total grosses seem unlikely to ever return to pre-pandemic levels, and of the 22 movies that did make $100M domestic in 2024, exactly one was a bona fide original (the Ryan Reynolds vehicle IF). The endangered mid-budget drama continues to dwindle with alarming speed, as corporations would rather churn out four-quadrant sequels than finance nominally riskier fare. Higher ticket prices discourage audiences from visiting theaters, especially when they can remain home and gulp down the anodyne content fed to them by streaming algorithms. Teenagers seem more interested in perpetually scrolling through bite-sized videos on their phones than in immersing themselves in dark auditoriums for two hours, and also they won’t get off my lawn. Read More

Was 2023 the year that saved the movies? It’s a question that stems from a false premise; any prior suggestion that cinema was imperiled—that the multiplex is homogenized, that streamers are destroying theaters, that studios don’t make films for grownups anymore—ignores the immutable fact (or at least this critic’s fierce opinion) that artists have spent the past decade stubbornly churning out high-quality motion pictures. Still, it’s difficult to deny that something happened on July 21, 2023—a moment that, depending on your perspective, either signaled a seismic shift in audience behavior or vindicated your long-held insistence that movies remain alive and well.

I am speaking, of course, of #Barbenheimer, that ungainly portmanteau of two of the year’s most critically and commercially successful pictures, which arrived in theaters on the same day. Rather than cannibalizing each other, they complemented one another, sparking a craze of double features and breathing fresh life into the industry. Here were two movies that, in empirical terms, had nothing in common; one was a brightly colored fantasy inspired by a doll, the other a sober and intense three-hour epic about the birth (and aftermath) of the atomic bomb. Yet people flocked to Barbie and Oppenheimer alike, and in the process they reminded everyone that the simple act of going to the movies remains a cherished pastime—a sacred ritual in which art and commerce need not be mutually exclusive. Read More