The Odyssey and Spider-Man propel record-breaking summer box office worldwide — SkimNews
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- The 2025 US summer box office grossed $4.761bn from May 1 to September 7, narrowly beating 2013's $4.756bn to set an all-time record.
- Spider-Man: Brand New Day has reached $2.4bn worldwide — the year's top film and third-highest-grossing ever — with the second-best opening weekend behind Avengers: Endgame (2019) and the second-fastest run to $1bn, reached in six days.
- Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey earned $1.6bn to become the highest-grossing "original" film of the year, despite being adapted from Homer's epic poem.
- Toy Story 5, Michael, and The Super Mario Galaxy Movie each crossed $1bn, while sequels broadly underperformed: Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu stopped at $345.4m, Supergirl at $126.4m, and Minions & Monsters at $518.1m — roughly half of 2022's Minions: The Rise of Gru.
- Low-budget horror films Backrooms ($394m) and Obsession ($513m) were credited with re-energizing the slate beyond the tentpoles.
- EMEA cinema admissions surged 88% year-on-year, with France recording its best August in 46 years of records (19.9m admissions, up 50%), Italy its best-ever June-August (20.8m admissions, €162.3m), Spain up 71%, and the Netherlands up 77%.
- The UK posted its biggest August since 2018, with admissions rising 56% year-on-year to over 17m — the second-best month since Barbie and Oppenheimer opened together in July 2023.
Why it matters: The record hinges on unusually heavy concentration: Spider-Man ($2.4bn) and The Odyssey ($1.6bn) account for roughly $4bn of the $4.761bn total, and with most other sequels underperforming, the headline number overstates the depth of the slate. The 88% EMEA lift — led by record-setting France and Italy — shows the rebound is genuinely international, not just a US phenomenon, reinforcing that cinema-going is recovering fastest where original local-language hits and event blockbusters coexist.
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