The week before Christmas is always a flurry of holiday activity — last-minute gift purchases, travel, maybe a few batches of cookies waiting to be baked — but it’s also when publications start scrambling to get all their year-in-review columns out the door. The best albums, the best movies, the best TV shows, even the best memes — as someone who’s spent a good chunk of her life compiling such lists, I can tell you that there are typically a few clear front-runners or consensus favorites that emerge.
This year is different. It was a year without a definitive “song of the summer” — no omnipresent, undeniable bops a la “Espresso” in 2024 — and one in which Hollywood experienced some of the worst box office misfires in recent memory, despite churning out a slew of expensive movies full of A-list actors delivering Oscar-worthy (or at the very least, Oscar-baity) performances. It was even a year that saw devoted Swifties turning on Taylor Swift after The Life of a Showgirl.
It all begs the question: was 2025, from a pop culture standpoint at least, kind of a flop?
It depends on how you measure success. Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another is the closest thing we’ve got to a lock when this year’s Oscar nominations are announced next month, and it’s been (rightly) praised as not just the best of this year, but the best of the decade — as one writer put it, a “generation-defining masterpiece.” But on paper, it’s a disaster for Warner Bros. As Variety pointed out in October, two weeks after the movie opened, it was projected to lose a whopping $100 million due to its massive budget. (Hey, those car chases are expensive!)
Other movies had similarly horrifying box office returns but also failed to resonate with critics. Christy, a biopic which featured Sydney Sweeney as boxer Christy Martin, was supposed to be the movie that would convince the public that Sweeney — who is frequently dismissed as nothing more than a sex symbol — is a serious actress. Instead, it earned a 66% on Rotten Tomatoes‘ aggregate of official reviews and had one of the worst opening weekends of all time. As Forbes reports, the movie grossed just $1.3 million domestically during its opening weekend — averaging just $646 per theater — giving it the ninth-worst opening for a wide-release movie in box office history. Meanwhile, Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere seemed like a no-brainer: a movie about one of the most beloved musicians of all time, starring one of the most popular, well-respected actors of this generation. (How many celebrities do you know with multiple Emmys who are also capable of breaking the internet with a Calvin Klein ad?) But despite Jeremy Allen White’s performance, the film earned mixed reviews and grossed approximately $45 million worldwide against a $55 million budget.
What Did It Take to Get a Bruce Springsteen Movie Made? We Asked the Producers.
Eric Robinson and Ellen Goldsmith-Vein detail how “Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere” made it to the big screenThe Smashing Machine also seemed to have all the makings of a hit: a Safdie brother in the director’s chair, and the highest-paid actor of 2024 delivering a performance that earned him Oscar buzz after its premiere at the Venice Film Festival. But perhaps Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s physical transformation as UFC fighter Mark Kerr was too believable, and any box office appeal he brings might’ve been negated by the fact that he’s virtually unrecognizable in the trailer. The Smashing Machine grossed just $6 million its opening weekend, making it the worst opening of Johnson’s career.
On the short-form side, despite all the chatter about the golden age of television, 2025 saw streaming viewership surpass broadcast and cable TV for the first time. But that doesn’t mean that streaming services are necessarily thriving, either. In May, YouTube had its highest share of TV viewing ever, at 12.5% — a bigger share than any streaming service to date and a full five percentage points higher than that of Netflix. And it was just announced this week that beginning in 2029, YouTube will be the new home of the Academy Awards. After Hulu botched their Oscars stream back in March, causing most viewers to miss the announcements of Best Actress and Best Picture, is it any wonder that the Academy would question whether streaming services are properly equipped to handle live events?
Of course, across the board, there are other metrics of success; just because something is popular doesn’t mean it’s good, and vice versa. Obviously there was still a ton of excellent work released in 2025, even if consumers had to look a little harder for it. Perhaps the real problem isn’t with this year’s releases themselves, but their inability to attract huge audiences. Is that a failure of marketing, or even worse, is it indicative of our refusal to pay for entertainment we now feel entitled to? If 2025 proved anything, it’s that people would rather stream movies at home instead of going to see them in a theater, and they’d rather watch clips for free on YouTube than actually stream a TV show. (And we’ve already known for years, sadly, that people would rather listen to an album on Spotify than go out and purchase a physical copy of it.) Add to that the rise of AI slop, and you’ve got a truly scary year for the entertainment industry.
There will always be incredible artists putting out incredible work, regardless of whether they’re critically acclaimed or financially successful or not. Independent releases are, and will remain, vital for any true pop culture enthusiast. But we should be worried about what 2025 means for the monoculture. Audiences are clearly fractured, and without a clear runaway hit, we’ve lost those water cooler moments where a piece of art works its way into the zeitgeist.
Thankfully there are still a few weeks left in the year to make one last effort. Try to squeeze in a movie over the holiday break to remind yourself what a thrill it is to sit in the dark with a bunch of strangers and have a collective experience — and then make a resolution to do it again and again in 2026.
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