Every year has its financial winners and its financial losers. 2024’s winners were Inside Out 2, Deadpool & Wolverine, and Wicked and its losers were Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga and Joker: Folie à Deux. For 2025, the winners were A Minecraft Movie and Lilo & Stitch. As for the movies that fell far short of expectations, the biggest of the bunch follow. We couldn’t include them all, so now we’ll shoutout the year’s other notable flops. For instance, Christy, which opened poorly and then set a record for second weekend drop, as well as Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere, M3GAN 2.0 (not a huge loss because the budget was kept low, but a bomb in comparison to its predecessor), The Smashing Machine, The Alto Knights, and Good Fortune. Then there’s After the Hunt, which certainly lost Amazon MGM Studios money. However, it was more of a destined-for-streaming movie than it was a movie that received a substantial marketing push for big screen bucks.
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But these next movies, there really isn’t much of an upside. Even with a ton of viewers on streaming they’re going to have a mighty hard time entering the black.
7) Mickey 17
It’s not unheard of for high-concept sci-fi movies to turn a profit. Ex Machina, Looper, Source Code, Inception, Interstellar, Everything Everywhere All at Once, The Matrix, they all made money.
That was not the case for Bong Joon Ho’s Mickey 17. But with a $118 million price tag, it would have needed to make just under $240 million worldwide to break even. And even though its director was coming off a Best Picture win for Parasite, even though its lead star had become the newest Batman, it just wasn’t the type of movie that had a blockbuster level of macro-scale appeal. Then end result was an estimated loss upwards of $80 million
Stream Mickey 17 on Prime Video.
6) Ballerina
It may feature the best action scene of 2025, but Ballerina ate it at the box office. To put its worldwide gross of $137.2 million into context, the low budget original John Wick film made $86 million, Chapter 2 made $174.3 million, Parabellum made $327.7 million, and Chapter 4 made $447.3 million. It was a franchise that was gradually accumulating a substantial number of fans between installments, and they flat-out did not show up for the spin-off.
In their August 2025 earnings report, Lionsgate reported a $94 million quarterly loss. Considering its TV wing has been doing well thanks to critic and fan favorite content like The Studio, most of that loss was attributed to the fact that Ballerina only made $137.2 million against $90 million. It’s hard to grasp why people didn’t care about this one. It wasn’t as if Chapter 4 turned people off to this universe. It even shoehorned Keanu Reeves’ Wick into the narrative, yet people just weren’t willing to give Ana de Armas’ Eve Macarro a chance. Both the character and the performer deserved more.
Stream Ballerina on Starz.
5) Elio
There aren’t many Pixar movies that underperform, much less flat-out flop, but such was the case for Elio. To put into context how rare this is, all four Toy Story movies, A Bug’s Life, both Monsters, Inc. films, Finding Nemo and Finding Dory, both of the Incredibles movies, and so on and so forth all made a ton of money. Their first failure wasn’t until 2015 with The Good Dinosaur.
Against a price tag upwards of $200 million, The Good Dinosaur made $332.2 million. Certainly not what Pixar and Disney were hoping for, but not nearly as bad as Elio. Onward and Soul had an excuse, they were COVID-era releases. Even Lightyear made $26 million more than its budget.
But Elio cost upwards of $200 million (maybe more) and it pulled in $154 million. This is Pixar’s biggest bomb to date and confirmation that the studio’s films aren’t the events they once were. On the upside, it did become a streaming hit on Disney+, but with an estimated loss of $100 million it is very difficult to imagine this movie ever making a dime.
Stream Elio on Disney+.
4) Thunderbolts*
With an estimated loss of about $100 million, Thunderbolts* was the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s bomb this year. Yet it’s the best of the three movies, a little better than The Fantastic Four: First Steps and leagues better than Captain America: Brave New World.
There are a few reasons why this came to be. For one, the MCU as a whole isn’t as commercially viable as it was pre-Endgame. It hasn’t brought in any new fans and has just lost more and more along the way thanks to duds like Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and Thor: Love and Thunder. The trailers also weren’t super clear on what the movie was about. Though, to be fair, if the marketing dove into how the movie’s core theme is depression, it wouldn’t have done the May movie many favors.
You can tell Disney was afraid after day three, since they edited all the banners in big cities to include its surprise title, The New Avengers, in the hopes that the last of those three words would pep up weekend two. It didn’t. It’s a shame, because Florence Pugh carries it extremely well and it was truly great to see Hannah John-Kamen back as Ghost, one of the MCU’s more intriguing villains.
Stream Thunderbolts* on Disney+.
3) The Running Man
While not the best Stephen King adaptation of 2025 (and there were quite a few), Edgar Wright’s The Running Man is nonetheless an enjoyable and faithful cinematic rendition of King’s—or, rather, Richard Bachman’s—source material. And it was a movie that received a substantial marketing push.
In other words, the bare minimum it would have needed to break even was twice its $110 million production budget. Likely quite a bit more than that. In other words, its fairly paltry $70 million worldwide haul meant a loss of over $100 million. Were there a confirmed loss available to include here, there’s a solid chance The Running Man would be in the number one spot.
2) Snow White
It may have rebounded a bit on Disney+, but the writing was already on the wall for Snow White, with a reported loss of $115 million from its time in theaters. This modern-day reboot of a classic Disney property was basically a punchline before it even opened, with criticisms ranging from fair (Gal Gadot’s performance as the Evil Queen as well as the look of the Seven Dwarfs) to unfair (the casting of Rachel Zegler).
Things only got worse when Gadot and Zegler made their opposing views of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict known on social media. Boycotts were called on both sides and the film couldn’t even match its budget on the low side. Specifically, its pre-marketing cost was $240 on the low end and $270 million on the high end. The movie’s worldwide total was $205.7 million.
Stream Snow White on Disney+.
1) Tron: Ares
The original Tron was a financial disappointment in theaters but accrued a cult following (it was somewhat profitable in theaters and only became more so over the passage of time). The same goes for Tron: Legacy. But, even if it builds itself a cult following, the same will not be true of Tron: Ares. Those movies underperformed, Ares flopped.
With a reported loss of $132.7 million, Ares very much seems to be the final nail in the coffin for this IP. It just doesn’t have the multi-quadrant appeal necessary to turn an investment of hundreds of millions into something lucrative. The first film tripled its budget, the second had a budget to final tally multiple of about 2.4. As for Ares, its haul was only about 65% of its pre-marketing price tag (if you’re looking at the upper end of its potential budget, which is $220 million). Disney must be thanking the heavens for Zootopia 2, because Tron: Ares really hurt them.
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Official art by Bastien Lecouffe-Deharme -
Image Courtesy of MAPPA -
A photo of the Retrovolt Arcade taken in 2017, showing several classic arcade cabinets and stools.
