10 blockbuster films you can’t miss in 2025

Unlike Marvel, which has a stacked year, DC has a quieter plan for 2025. But there is one blockbuster which all eyes will be on. Superman.

Henry Cavill is gone, with newcomer David Corenswet now in the spandex suit, and Guardians of the Galaxy maestro James Gunn on writing and directing duty. Rounding out the cast is The Marvelous Mrs Maisel’s Rachel Brosnahan as Lois Lane and Nicholas Hoult facing down the Man of Steel as Lex Luthor.

In Gunn’s new take on the story, we meet Superman when he’s in his mid-20s and a young journalist at the Daily Planet, when, suddenly, he’s forced to reconcile the life he had on Krpyton with his new world as Clark Kent. That’s all we know so far.

The rest of the cast list includes introductions for Gunn’s new take on Green Lantern, Metamorpho and Hawk Girl, meaning a lot is riding on this movie as the DC Universe goes through yet another reboot.

Is this the final hurrah for Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt? We’re not sure, but if it is to be the end, he’s certainly going out with a bang.

A direct sequel to 2023’s Dead Reckoning Part One, we’re once again watching as Hunt and the Impossible Missions Force battle to defeat the Entity, a powerful rogue AI, capable of impersonating anybody and cracking any system.

All the team are back — Hayley Atwell, Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Vanessa Kirby and Henry Czerny, with Nick Offerman and Ted Lasso’s Hannah Waddingham joining the party for this new movie. Christopher McQuarrie directs for a fourth time in the franchise.

With a budget that’s somewhere around the $400 million mark, we’re expecting the stunts and action set pieces to be on another level. Filming has taken place everywhere from the Highlands of Scotland to Malta and Norway, and colour us excited for another globe-trotting, death-defying adventure. He might be in his 60s now, but no one pushes himself for stunts like Tom Cruise does.

After wowing everyone with Top Gun: Maverick, the world was director Joseph Kosinski’s oyster when it came to his next project. And he has chosen a whopper.

Bringing together Brad Pitt, a budget that’s estimated to be in the region of $300 million and a cast that also includes Snowfall’s Damson Idris and Javier Bardem, F1 is a new Formula One blockbuster that has been made in collaboration with the FIA, the sport’s governing body.

It tells the story of Pitt’s Sonny Hayes, a Formula One driver who ruled supreme in the 1990s, but his career ends suddenly after a horrible crash. Suddenly, the owner of a new upstart team contacts him and demands he come out of retirement to mentor rookie prodigy Joshua Pearce, as they set their sights on winning for the newly created Apex Grand Prix team.

The footage shown so far looks incredible, and, as he showed on Top Gun: Maverick, Kosinski’s ability to capture speed and thrilling stunts is unrivalled. One not to miss.

Now this is exciting. More than 20 years on from 2002’s universally-adored 28 Days Later, which saw Cillian Murphy’s Jim awake from a coma to discover that the world has fallen into ruin after the outbreak of a highly contagious virus, the franchise's original gang is back together.

Danny Boyle, who directed the first film, Alex Garland, who wrote it, and Murphy, are all returning for what is billed as the start of a new trilogy.

The ante has been upped significantly in terms of budget, with $75 million being spent on this latest instalment, compared to $8 million the first time around. Starring alongside Murphy are Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Jodie Comer, Ralph Fiennes and Jack O'Connell.

For the story, we find ourselves confronting the return of the zombie-creating “Rage” virus, many years after the events of the last instalment, 28 Weeks Later. A group of survivors must come together to try and survive in a world ravaged by hordes of the infected. We’re excited about this one.

The third instalment of James Cameron’s five-part Avatar saga arrives in time for Christmas 2025. Filmed at the same time as 2022’s Avatar: The Way of Water, Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldaña, Sigourney Weaver, Stephen Lang, Giovanni Ribisi and Kate Winslet are all back to star.

Plot details are scant at this point, but we know the events are set to pick up three years after The Way of Water. The Ash in the title is a reference to “The Ash People”, a tribe who are on less than good terms with the Na'vi. Expect big battles and epic 3D.

We’re getting two more Avatar movies, due in 2029 and 2031 respectively, so there are plenty more adventures to come.

Awards darling Paul Thomas Anderson is not a man you associate with blockbusters. He makes muscular and character-driven dramas like There Will Be Blood and The Master, but his new project, due in August of 2025, is a different proposition.

Firstly, it has a big budget, one north of $150 million, with $20 million of that going to Leonardo DiCaprio who stars alongside Sean Penn, Benicio del Toro, Regina Hall, Teyana Taylor and Alana Haim. Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood is once again providing the score.

Secondly, this is billed as Anderson’s most mainstream movie to date, although plot details are scant. There’s no plot summary or any details. It is rumoured to be an adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland, but that’s not confirmed in any official way. Anderson has adapted Pynchon before, for 2010’s Inherent Vice.

For a blockbuster of that size to have such secrecy is unheard of, but this is Paul Thomas Anderson, the most acclaimed director of the last 20 years. He has 11 Oscar nominations, but so far no wins. Operating on this scale and with this cast could change that.

Netflix has spent a whopping $320 million on this new dystopian effort, which brings together Millie Bobby Brown, Chris Pratt, Ke Huy Quan, Jason Alexander, Woody Harrelson, Anthony Mackie and Brian Cox, with Avengers directors Anthony and Joe Russo in the directors’ chairs.

An adaptation of Simon Stålenhag’s beloved graphic novel, the movie is set in an alternative 1994, one where robots, built to help the US army, have risen up and now rule. Brown plays Michelle, a teenage girl who unexpectedly befriends a robot, and together they head out on a journey in search of her long-lost brother.

The visuals from the teaser trailer look incredible, and no one does scale and destruction like the Russo brothers.

The prospect of a sequel to 2010’s Tron: Legacy has been on and off the cards countless times, but, in the end, Disney has settled on a new reboot with a new star: Jared Leto.

We’ve travelled a long way from the 1982 original, where Jeff Bridges’ Kevin Flynn played a computer programmer and video game developer who found himself sucked into the world of the computer he was building. Now, Leto plays the titular Ares, a highly sophisticated program that is dispatched from cyberspace into the real world on a dangerous mission, thus marking humankind’s first encounter with A.I. beings.

Starring alongside Leto are Evan Peters, Jodie Turner-Smith, Greta Lee and Gillian Anderson, while original Tron star Bridges is also involved in some capacity.

Legacy featured a score from Daft Punk, but, with the robots retired, Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross have stepped up and will provide something just as sonically-iconic, we have no doubt.

Jurassic World: Dominion, the final act of the Jurassic World trilogy which starred Chris Pratt and Bruce Dallas Howard, received an underwhelming critical response, but still managed to rake in more than $1.4 billion at the box office. In time-honoured Hollywood fashion, producers have decided to keep the franchise going, just with a whole new cast.

This time, Scarlett Johansson, Mahershala Ali, Jonathan Bailey and Rupert Friend lead the way, with Monsters and Star Wars spin-off Rogue One director Gareth Edwards at the helm.

In this new movie, we’re five years on from the events of Dominion, and dinosaurs are struggling to survive in Earth’s atmosphere. But, somehow, it has been discovered that three of the species’ biggest beasts hold the key to a drug that will bring miraculous life-saving benefits to humankind. Naturally, scientists need to get hold of those benefits and have tasked Johansson’s Zora Bennett with leading a team to get them.

As you might imagine, things get complicated when they meet a family whose boating expedition had been interrupted by marauding aquatic dinosaurs, and they all find themselves trapped on an island. Expect carnage and chaos, all best enjoyed on the biggest of screens.

After a quiet 2024, 2025 is a big year for Marvel at the cinema, with a new Captain America launching with Captain America: Brave New World, the long-awaited new take on Fantastic Four, and, allegedly, their new Mahershala Ali-led take on Blade arriving in the winter. But, for our pick of the best blockbusters of 2025, we’ve gone with Thunderbolts. Why? Because it looks like the most fun.

Thunderbolts are the MCU’s answer to Suicide Squad, a collection of villains and mercenaries you’ll have seen before in many of the other movies. Led by Florence Pugh's Yelena Belova and Sebastian Stan's Bucky Barnes, they are brought together under the tutelage of Julia Louis-Dreyfus's Valentina Allegra de Fontaine, the director of the CIA, who recruits them to go on dangerous and decidedly off-the-books missions for the government. Naturally, not all of them go to plan.

Billed as a return to Marvel’s roots with talk of CGI being shunned and the stunts being next level, Thunderbolts* looks like the kind of thrill ride only Marvel knows how to deliver.