JOHN NOLTE: Box Office Has Worst Weekend of the Year, Worst Halloween in 32 Years.
Let’s take a look at this weekend’s can-miss titles, shall we?
Something called Regretting You.
A sequel to a fairly successful horror movie called Black Phone.
Something called Regretting You.
A sequel to a fairly successful horror movie called Black Phone.
Something called Chainsaw Man.
Something called K-Pop Demon Hunters — which, I think, was already on TV.
That Springsteen movie that came out 40 years after anyone would care.
Something called Bugonia
Something called Roofman.
Tron: Jared Leto
One Battle After Another.
If I Had Legs I’d Kick You…
The result…?
Total weekend revenue came in at just $49.8 million, marking the worst weekend of 2025 and the lowest-grossing Halloween weekend in more than 30 years, according to Comscore. The last time October’s final weekend was this dismal was in 1993 — not counting 2020’s pandemic closures.
The few times I’ve gone to the movies this year, I’m astounded by how many trailers typically show before the feature (I’m looking at you, AMC), and how few trailers leave me thinking, “Yeah, I want to see that on the big screen!” (The vast majority of trailers leave me with no desire to see the movies they’re plugging at all, even at home.) The combination of streaming fatigue, no new stars, and the inability to move past the superhero/sci-fi/sequel mobius loop that Hollywood has been trapped in for at least 15 years now has left the industry as moribund as it was when the Easy Riders/Raging Bulls-era of Young Turks got their start in the late 1960s. Actually, it’s worse, since films in the 1960s and pre-Star Wars 1970s typically had far lower budgets (even adjusted for inflation) than today’s cinematic bloatware, and could thus take far more chances.
And as a result, as the L.A. Times reported last year: Hollywood crews in ‘crisis:’ ‘Everyone’s just in panic mode’ as jobs decline.
2025 has been the dumping ground for product shot last year, when at least until the debate in June, Hollywood collectively believed that of course Biden’s got this one in the bag, and then afterwards, spent the summer and fall believing that of course, Kamala has this one in the bag. They can’t use that excuse for the material they shot this year, so 2026’s product will be fun to observe, at least Kremlinologist style, to see if it’s worth venturing back to the multiplex:
