2025's Summer Movies, Definitively Ranked

Summer movies are officially back. When was the last time we had such a strong blockbuster season lineup going into the season? Yes, there was Barbenheimer back in 2023—but that was two films on the same day. In 2025, early signals suggest that the summer war for multiplex supremacy is going to rage on for months.

For one, we've got two of the most hotly anticipated comic book movies since Avengers: Endgame in Superman and The Fantastic Four: First Steps. Between M3GAN 2.0, Weapons and 28 Years Later, genre thrills abound. And then there's Joseph Kosinski's F1, the Brad Pitt racing thriller that looks to replicate the kinetic brilliance of Top Gun: Maverick.

These and a whole slate of other major new films suggest that we're going to be spending a lot of time hiding from the sun in air-conditioned cinema auditoriums this summer; our tans might suffer, but at least the movies will be great. Here are ten we're already seated for.

Past Lives writer-director Celine Song is debuting her sophomore movie in August (though the Americans will get it in June), and it's a New York rom-com led by a love triangle of A-list talent: Pedro Pascal, Chris Evans and Dakota Johnson. By the looks of things it'll be a real throwback to those mid-budget studio films of the pre-Avengers past where a bunch of great actors are assembled to cut it up on screen for 90 minutes — and what's not to love about that? Don't expect Materialists to blow away the box office, but we couldn't imagine a nicer awards-courting digestif to close out the summer season.

Is it a fool's errand to look forward to a Jurassic movie in 2025, with Rebirth set to be the seventh installment, when none of them have really been good since the original Jurassic Park? Probably! But there are reasons to reckon that Rebirth will save everyone's favourite dino franchise from extinction. Its assembled creative team is killer, led by dependable Godzilla director Gareth Edwards and returning JP writer David Koepp. Then there's the primo cast of Scarlett Johansson, Mahershala Ali and Jonathan Bailey, with the series seemingly moving on from Chris Pratt and Co. Don't be overly surprised if it's a banger.

How to Train Your Dragon isn't quite a Minions or Pixar-sized franchise at the box office, but the original animated films have historically done good business at the multiplex, so there's little reason to think less of the upcoming live-action remake. The underwhelming performance of the live-action Snow White earlier this year might dampen expectations — have audiences become fatigued with live-action remakes, or is it just a Disney thing?—but it feels as though a big family-friendly fantasy blockbuster should sustain the shift to live-action better than the IRL version of a beloved classic no one asked for.

The all-singing, all-dancing, all-slaying AI doll is back for an upgrade in M3GAN 2.0, the sequel to Gerard Johnstone's 2023 hit horror camp-a-thon. With a new villain on the horizon, it looks like 2.0 is taking the T-2 route and making a hero out of M3GAN, which is totally to be expected after she went viral and became every gay guy's go-to drag Halloween costume. The main indicator that Universal is expecting great things here? While the first movie came out in January—typically a movie dead zone reserved for failed awards bait and C-tier studio efforts—2.0 has been given a prime late June release amid the 28 Years and F1's of the world. Huge slay.

With the recent critical and box office success of Thunderbolts* aka The New Avengers, one has to wonder whether we'll look back on 2025 as the year that superhero movies reclaimed their supremacy over the box office. The first of two major test cases will be James Gunn's back-to-basics reboot of Superman, previously titled Superman: Legacy, which recasts David Corenswet as the titular hero and resets the waning DC film universe. Fortunately, Gunn has an excellent track record insofar as comic book films go, having helmed both the Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy and The Suicide Squad, all of which rank among the genre's top efforts. Will Superman be his crowning achievement, or will it prove his kryptonite? On current evidence, we're leaning towards the former.

Expected to be Tom Cruise's Mission: Impossible swansong, The Final Reckoning will be the eighth instalment of the death-defying spy franchise—and by far the most expensive at an eye-watering $400 million. But hey, you spare no expense when it comes to the King of Hollywood, not least in a post-Top Gun: Maverick world, and these films usually do pretty well regardless. The movie is set to pick up after the events of Dead Reckoning Part One, with Cruise's Ethan Hunt continuing his pursuit of the AI program known as “the Entity,” while at some point hanging from a biplane en route. The stunts will be crazy, we'll wonder how a now 62-year-old Cruise wasn't killed, and further, we'll be begging him to drop the skin care routine. It'll take a lot to claw back that mega-budget, but who cares? This is about as sure a bet for a good time at the movies as they come.

Six years after Disney completed its acquisition of 20th Century Fox, reclaiming the rights to The X-Men and the Fantastic Four in the process, Marvel's first family are finally making their feature-length debut on the MCU stage. Excitement around superhero movies has waned, but there's a lot of reason to think that nü Fantastic Four will represent a step back in the right direction: take its ‘60s retro-futuristic, Fallout-esque setting, with costumes and sets that are steeped in Googie imagination, or that stacked cast, led by Pedro “I’m literally in everything” Pascal, Vanessa Kirby, Joseph Quinn and Ebon Moss-Bachrach. All in all, it's the first time we've actively looked forward to a comic book flick since Spider-Man: No Way Home, and may just be the shot in the arm that Marvel needs in the run-up to Avengers: Doomsday.

On the back of its thus far flawless viral marketing campaign, followed by a spooky trailer steeped in dread, Barbarian director Zach Cregger's Weapons has emerged as a major dark horse in the summer movie season. The logline is simple: 17 kids go missing at exactly the same time in the dead of night in the same small Pennsylvania town, leaving the locals to grapple with a terrifying mystery. Speaking to the huge amount of buzz Creggers' film has built in the movie world, the Weapons script was subject to a vicious bidding war before it went into production; soon after losing out, Get Out horror mogul Jordan Peele allegedly cut ties with his management staff. All in all, it's about as hot as horror properties get.

Rumours of a sequel in the 28 series have circulated since the release of 28 Weeks Later, which came out way-back-when in 2007. Now we finally have 28 Years Later, which looks to pick up on events almost three decades after the escape of those rage-infected chimps saw the swift collapse of the still-quarantined UK. Plot details are very much under wraps, but we know it will at least in part concern a NATO squad that travel to Northern England for yet-to-be-disclosed reasons. Plus, Jack O'Connell will appear as a cult figure, while Ralph Fiennes is playing a post-apocalyptic doctor. The first trailer was one of the best we've seen in years, and the second has ramped up our anticipation tenfold. There are big plans for a trilogy, with sequel The Bone Temple already in production for a January release.

Look, you never know for sure, but we'd put a big bet on F1 topping the podium come the end of the summer movie season. Two reasons: firstly, it's directed by Joseph Kosinski, who looks to replicate his Top Gun: Maverick success with another story about an aging anti-establishment hot shot going for one last dance; secondly, said hero is played by Brad Pitt, whose name remains synonymous with “box office” in the minds of most global movie goers. All told, it pretty much looks like the Top Gun sequel with race cars instead of jet planes. And that's one formula for sure-fire success we can get behind.

This story originally appeared in British GQ.