Let me start with a number that should not be possible.
$1.9 billion. Earned by a single animated film. In a single country. In roughly eight weeks. Ne Zha 2 became the highest-grossing animated film of all time and the fifth highest-grossing film in cinema history, earning nearly 99% of its colossal total from Chinese screens alone. Not from a global theatrical rollout. Not from IMAX premiums in fifty countries. From one market, one sequel, one Lunar New Year weekend that grew into something the industry had no framework to process.
If you experienced 2025 through a PVR in Bangalore or a multiplex in Manhattan and never caught a frame of it, you watched the year from the wrong seat. The biggest story cinema told in 2025 wasn’t in English, and it wasn’t in Hollywood’s ledger.
That’s the headline buried under the familiar Western metrics. The global box office closed at an estimated $33.5 billion — a nearly 12% increase on 2024 — but strip China out of the equation and that gain shrinks to a still-healthy 8%. The lesson, for anyone who still needed it: the cinema economy is no longer centred in Los Angeles. It has multiple centres, multiple languages, and audiences who have stopped waiting for Hollywood’s permission to make their own events.
Japan understood this years ago. Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba — Infinity Castle grossed over $780 million worldwide, becoming the highest-grossing Japanese film of all time, and arrived in Indian cinemas to genuinely sold-out shows. The anime industry, once the province of fan conventions and fansub communities, is now a $25 billion global enterprise eating the multiplex calendar from the inside. Any publication that still covers it as a niche curiosity is filing from the wrong decade.
Hollywood, for its part, had a year that was good in flashes and complicated everywhere else. A Minecraft Movie was the top-grossing film in North America, turning blocky chaos into a near-billion-dollar domestic earner — aided by a generation of Gen Z audiences who grew up inside the game and showed up to celebrate it with a communal energy last seen at the height of Marvel’s Infinity Saga (and, in at least one documented Utah screening, a live chicken). Lilo & Stitch crossed a billion dollars, becoming the highest-grossing live-action animated film of all time. Disney’s nostalgia engine continues to run. Warner Bros., meanwhile, quietly assembled one of the best studio years in recent memory — Superman, Jurassic World: Rebirth, A Minecraft Movie, and Sinners performing across wildly different genres, with Sinners delivering the largest opening weekend of any original, non-franchise film of the decade and finishing the year as the most award-decorated film across all global critics bodies.
But the most interesting things that happened in 2025 happened away from the IP machine.
Ryan Coogler’s Sinners arrived in April as a supernatural horror film and revealed itself, over 310 award wins and four Oscar triumphs, to be something rarer: an original American epic about the theft of Black creativity, filmed in dying formats by the first woman ever to win the Academy Award for cinematography, financed on the director’s own terms. It was the year’s most discussed film, its most written-about film, and ultimately runner-up for the biggest prize to Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, which topped the IndieWire Critics Poll by a significant margin and won Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay at the Academy Awards. Two original, adult, deliberately uncommercial American films trading the year’s highest honours. The obituary for cinema was, once again, premature.
The international prestige circuit was the richest it has been in years, and Cannes 2025 in particular felt like a festival that remembered what it was built for. The Palme d’Or went to Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident, the Grand Prix to Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value, and the Jury Prize was shared between Oliver Laxe’s Sirât and Mascha Schilinski’s Sound of Falling. Panahi, who has been repeatedly imprisoned by the Iranian government and explicitly banned from filmmaking, made his film in secret and smuggled it to competition. That it won the festival’s highest honour is one of 2025’s genuinely important cultural events — not just a cinematic one. The prize felt like the industry doing something with its platform that platforms occasionally should do.
Brazil announced itself loudly. Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent — a political thriller set in 1977 Recife — won Best Director and Best Actor at Cannes and landed in virtually every international critics’ top ten. Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice reminded everyone that South Korean cinema is not a post-Parasite moment but a permanent presence in the global conversation. And from India, Neeraj Ghaywan’s Homebound — described at Cannes as the first time in ages that a mainstream Hindi-language production has felt genuinely vital — made the Oscar shortlist for International Feature Film before inexplicably failing to make the final five. That snub remains the year’s most baffling awards omission.
Now, since this is MovieRamen and roughly half our readers are sitting in Indian cinemas when they’re not sitting at their phones: let’s talk about what actually happened here this year, because it was extraordinary.
India’s box office reached a record-breaking $1.48 billion in 2025, surpassing the previous record set in 2023, with Hindi films alone grossing a combined $609 million — around 93% of which came from original Hindi-language titles, not dubbed South Indian imports. That last figure is the real shift. Bollywood spent 2023 and 2024 leaning heavily on dubbed South blockbusters to prop up its numbers. In 2025, it made its own hits — and made them differently than it had in years.
Chhaava, Laxman Utekar’s historical epic about Sambhaji Maharaj, opened February and didn’t stop. Vicky Kaushal delivered a physical, committed performance that felt like it belonged to a different era of mainstream Bollywood — pre-irony, pre-franchise thinking, genuinely invested in its subject. The film’s ₹808 crore worldwide gross made it the year’s biggest Hindi opener and, for most of the year, its biggest Hindi film.
Then July arrived, and with it the most surprising story Indian cinema produced all year.
Saiyaara, directed by Mohit Suri and starring two complete newcomers — Ahaan Panday and Aneet Padda — in the lead roles, grossed over ₹579 crore worldwide, becoming the highest-grossing Indian romantic film of all time, surpassing Kabir Singh. The strategy was as unconventional as the result: Panday and Padda did not promote the film at all before its release — no interviews, no promotional tours, no social media content, no influencer partnerships — with director Suri wanting audiences to encounter them for the first time on screen. In an era when Bollywood promotional machinery starts months before a frame is shot, the silence was deafening. The result spoke for itself. The title track topped charts for weeks. Two people nobody had heard of in January were the most talked-about actors in the country by August.
Late in the year, Ranveer Singh’s Dhurandhar — a spy thriller directed by Uri‘s Aditya Dhar — arrived and kept going until it became the highest-grossing Bollywood film of all time, surpassing Stree 2, finishing at over ₹1,100 crore worldwide. From the south, Rishab Shetty delivered Kantara: A Legend — Chapter 1, the prequel the entire country had been waiting for since 2022, which grossed ₹853 crore and proved that the Kantara universe is not a one-film phenomenon but a genuine franchise on its own terms. Malayalam cinema, consistently punching above its weight class, produced Lokah: Chapter 1 — Chandra, a superhero feature that crossed ₹300 crore and rewrote what Malayalam box office records looked like. None of the three fit the conventional “safe bet” blockbuster template, yet collectively Saiyaara, Mahavatar Narsimha, and Lokah contributed over ₹1,200 crore worldwide — outperforming several marquee, star-driven projects.
The lesson Indian cinema taught in 2025 was the same one Hollywood taught with Sinners and Cannes taught with Panahi: audiences are not exhausted by cinema. They’re exhausted by cinema that doesn’t believe in itself. Give them something made with conviction — a love story where the leads actually feel like they’re discovering each other, a vampire film that turns the blues into a weapon, a Palme d’Or winner made by a man banned from making films — and they will find a way to show up.
Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme opened Christmas Day and delivered Timothée Chalamet’s best performance yet. Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein was stranger and more moving than it had any right to be. Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet gave Jessie Buckley a role worthy of what she’s always been capable of. The art-house calendar was quietly, consistently extraordinary.
One international distribution executive characterised 2025 as “a little disappointing” but noted that everyone in the industry “can look forward to 2026 with some optimism.” With respect: it depends entirely on what you were measuring. IMAX posted a record $1.28 billion in global box office for 2025 — surpassing its previous record from 2019 — which tells you that when cinema gives audiences a reason to come, they come, and they choose the biggest screen available.
That is the year in a sentence. Not the numbers, not the records, not the awards race — just that one persistent, stubborn fact: when films earn it, the audience arrives. In Bangalore and Beijing, in Lagos and London, in whatever multiplex you call yours. Every year that cinema survives is the year it didn’t need saving. 2025 didn’t need saving. It just needed better films.
It got them.
