LONDON, ENGLAND - JULY 02: David Corenswet attends the "Superman" Fan Event in London's Leicester Square on July 02, 2025 in London, England. (Photo by Tristan Fewings/Getty Images for Warner Bros)
The way people go to the movies has been changing but don’t be fooled into thinking the future is bleak for movie theaters. In fact, when you crunch the box office numbers they reveal some optimistic trends.
Some analysts panicked when James Camerons’ latest “Avatar” chapter debuted $20 million under box office projections on its opening weekend back in December 2022. But in due course, the film made five times that number in box office, and there is no reason to fret this summer’s box office, either, because numbers seem to be showing us that people tend to go out less for opening weekends of major movies than they used to. Instead, the secret to success for modern movies seems to lie in their long “legs.”
“Superman”, “Weapons,” and “F1: The Movie” each had solid opening weekends, but their real success was in their long legs. Not Aunt Gladys’ stellar gams, but the films’ weekend-to-weekend holds, with each making about three and a half times the amount of their debut weekend over the course of their theater runs. It means people actually liked these movies, told their friends and families to go, or returned themselves.
There have been a few other surprising trends in recent box office numbers. First up, reboots originally bound for streaming have outperformed. Both “Freakier Friday” and the summer’s biggest winner “Lilo & Stitch (2025)” were originally bound for streaming, so Disney would’ve been thrilled if they brought in any money at all, and they did in fact bring in a lot. The Lindsay Lohan reboot bought in almost $150 million and the Lilo and Stitch remake made $423 million domestically.
Different kinds of movies were making a splash in a way they haven’t in a while, with two R-rated horror films, “Weapons” and “Final Destination: Bloodlines” cracking the top 10 domestic summer box office and A24’s romantic dramedy ”Materialists” making over $100 million globally.
There were some surprising losses with films like Pixar’s “Elio” and “Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning”, which made $600 million globally but needed to make around $800 million to justify its $400 million production budget. But those aren’t the main story. Film going culture is rebuilding itself, and the future looks bright with great holds, studios making their streaming content profitable, and variety returning to the big screen.
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A Michigan judge is putting sponges in the hands of shoplifters and ordering them to wash cars in a Walmart parking lot when spring weather arrives. Genesee County Judge Jeffrey Clothier hopes the unusual form of community service discourages people from stealing from Walmart. The judge also wants to reward shoppers with free car washes. Clothier says he began ordering “Walmart wash” sentences this week for shoplifting at the store in Grand Blanc Township. He believes 75 to 100 people eventually will be ordered to wash cars this spring. Clothier says he will be washing cars alongside them when the time comes.
The State Department had been in talks with Elon Musk’s Tesla company to buy armored electric vehicles, but the plans have been put on hold by the Trump administration after reports emerged about a potential $400 million purchase. A State Department spokesperson said the electric car company owned by Musk was the only one that expressed interest back in May 2024. The deal with Tesla was only in its planning phases but it was forecast to be the largest contract of the year. It shows how some of his wealth has come and was still expected to come from taxpayers.
At 100 years old, the Goodyear Blimp is an ageless star in the sky. The 246-foot-long airship will be in the background of the Daytona 500 — flying roughly 1,500 feet above Daytona International Speedway, actually — to celebrate its greatest anniversary tour. Even though remote camera technologies are improving regularly and changing the landscape of aerial footage, the blimp continues to carve out a niche. At Daytona, with the usual 40-car field racing around a 2½-mile superspeedway, views from the blimp aptly provide the scope of the event.
You'll just have to wait for interest rates (and prices) to go down. Plus, this deal's a steel, the big carmaker wedding is off, and bribery is back, baby!
