Are Good Movies Going Away In 2025?

If you’re a movie nerd or just happen to enjoy dropping by your local theater every now and again,  you might have already heard (or voiced) the complaint that there are just no good movies out anymore. It was a long, dry stretch from Dune Part 2 in March of 2024 to Wicked in November of the same year – and even movies that had larger groups of fans looking forward to them (like War of the Roherrim) neglected to stay in theaters for very long.

It isn’t just that fewer movies have been in theaters during the past few years, either. In fact, nearly 600 movies were released in 2024 – that’s more movies than were released in 2023 (or any of the years since the pandemic, for that matter). 

While some of the movie theater decline we’ve been seeing within the past few years is thanks to the pandemic – with 2019 releasing nearly a whopping 800 movies to theaters in the U.S., almost 200 more than we saw released in 2024 – a lot of it is also because of streaming services. 

There’s just not quite as much blockbuster buzz as there once was – if most moviegoers are content to stay home and enjoy a film from the comfort of their couch, there’s not much point in releasing a movie to theaters in the first place. This means that a few blockbuster potentials never see the silver screen at all. It also means that streaming services are okay with creating lower-budget, lower-quality movies to save on production costs, since they already know their flicks won’t be hitting theaters in the first place. Sound mixing, who?

With the exception of a few notable blockbusters in 2024 and 2023 – think Barbenheimer, for example – many movies that received the most buzz never hit theaters at all. 

The biggest defining factor of most people’s perceptions of why movies have been on a downward trend for the past few years, however, is because of the low-quality flicks that have made it to theaters. It’s not just that good movies are few and far between – it’s that we have to slog through months of bad ones while we wait, too. From the hyped-up and flopped-out arrival of movies like Mean Girls, Argyle, or The Crow to movies that were never going to make it big in the first place (Red One, anyone?), the movie theater doesn’t really feel like a place to go for a serious film anymore. 

To be fair, we have seen an increase in poorly-rated blockbusters within the past few years, too. Hit smash movie Joker was followed up with a depressingly low-quality sequel in 2024, which disappointed fans and died out as rapidly as it hit theaters. Every Marvel and superhero movie that launched in 2024 was a massive bust. Besides a few sequels to beloved pieces of media that already existed – Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, Dune Part Two, and Wicked – not a lot of movies really succeeded at surviving judgment day (aka Rotten Tomatoes’ audience ratings).

In 2025, we can expect to see an increase in remakes and sequels – an attempt from movie producers to build on hype that was created in the perceived ‘golden age’ of movies. After all, there’s nothing like playing on a little bit of nostalgia to bring back a time when movies were (mostly) good. There’s nothing wrong with time-traveling all the way back to 2012 to do a live-action remake of How to Train Your Dragon (or maybe I’m just a sucker for the animated films), but we may well be seeing original films continue to decline within the next few years. Or hey, who knows – maybe the arrival of Frozen 3 will save us all.