As an observer of the film industry, a reader of articles and listener of podcasts, there seemed to be a lot of doom and gloom around in 2025. IP serialisation is still very much the name of the game in Hollywood, but while family-focused blockbusters like Zootopia 2, A Minecraft Movie and the live-action remakes of Lilo & Stitch and How to Train Your Dragon performed strongly, new instalments in the previously bankable Marvel Cinematic Universe, Jurassic World, Avatar, Mission: Impossible, and Wicked all failed to gross as much as previous entries. We had Trump’s announcement that tariffs were going to be introduced on movies made outside of the US and the uncertainty about how that would work and what it would mean. There is the question of what the pending sale of Warner Brothers to Netflix means for the future of both the studio and the theatrical and physical media releasing of their films. And then, of course, there is the continued uncertainty about what impact the increasing prevalence of generative AI will have on the screen sectors. All good fodder for the glass-half-empty types.

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