CinemaCon 2025 Takeaways: Diverse Slates, Warner Stumbles, Tom Cruise Still Rules

The theatrical movie business is facing as tough a time as ever, but there’s one new thing in the mix: the alliance between distributors and exhibitors is tighter than it’s been in years. 

And they’re all asking: Will the movie business ever get a break? 

At the annual CinemaCon gathering of theatrical exhibitors in Las Vegas, a major new distributor this year was welcomed in Amazon/MGM during a year when the box office is down a sickening 11% over last year’s not-great performance. We saw a pipeline of movie slates refilled from all the major studios after four – count them – years of COVID lockdowns and labor strikes. 

But we also saw a renewed camaraderie in the trenches between the Hollywood studios and theatrical exhibitors. Once facing a split over theatrical windows and the siren song of streaming, legacy studios finally seem convinced that they need a solid theatrical business to support the downstream revenue of streaming, PVOD and licensing. And so for the first time in years, it feels like everyone wants to put the business on better footing to face a future more solid than the first half of the 2020s. 

In his welcome remarks, Paramount distribution chief Chris Aronson, like a kind but stern schoolmaster, laid out measures he believes the exhibitors need to take to drive more people to theaters: meaningful data-sharing, fewer trailers and ads in the theater, more discounts, upgrades to their physical plant. “The time is now to turn your business upside down,” he said. Conversations I had with several exhibitors, notably the head of Regal Theaters Eduardo Acuna, suggested their strong agreement. 

Here are my takeaways from the week in Vegas: 

Violence dialed down, but romance is still nonexistent 

The biggest movies of 2025 look ready to entertain broad audiences: Joseph Kosinski’s “F1” starring Brad Pitt from Apple/Warner; Tom Cruise in the very last (supposedly) “Mission: Impossible- The Final Reckoning”; and James Cameron’s “Avatar: Fire and Ash” at Disney. 

What was notable was a welcome decline in the recent unending diet of brutally violent, almost sadistic movies, whether medium budget or big blockbusters. For the past half-dozen years, CinemaCon has been a festival of ear-splitting explosions and experiments in the diversity of ways to pound, slice, pierce or smash a human body. Watched back to back it became a punishment for the viewer, a soul-crushing orgy of violence, a true failure of imagination that showed off the prowess of VFX geniuses or more likely the warped fantasy of some directors.

But honestly there was a lot less of that this year, which is to say there was still plenty (“Ballerina” with Ana de Armas), but it was not exclusively so. There were thrillers, more clever than violent, and ideas behind many of the films. (Thank you Lionsgate for trying harder. Jason Blum, you are excused from this discussion because it’s what you do so well.) Amazon-MGM’s upcoming “Project Hail Mary,” starring Ryan Gosling, looks like it marries drama, humor, sci-fi, amazing cinematography and the slay-me charm of that particular movie star. It also looks like a big hit. Studios – you can do this! 

What is still missing from theatrical movie screens is any sign of human intimacy or – God forbid – love. That seems to have been banished from any and all cinematic slates for all time. Hollywood, are you so sure that audiences never want to see a love story again?  

Experience matters: Universal has it 

Fresh off the triumph of “Wicked,” on the path to making the sequel “Wicked For Good,” Universal brought a confident air to Vegas. With the most elegant presentation of any studio all week, a 45-piece orchestra was flown from LA to play a live, stunning medley of Universal’s own musical theme but also the themes of movies from “E.T.” to “Psycho” to “Jurassic Park.” Ricky Minor conducted this tour de force of some of the most talented musicians on planet earth (I was told they rehearsed just once before playing live before 4,500 people) and it was absolutely thrilling. 

The confidence is well earned from an experienced, veteran team that has continued to embrace the theatrical business and find a diverse slate without the benefit of an IP closet, led by a chairman who is at the top of her game, Donna Langley. Looking queenlike in an all-winter-white suit, Langley stood in the middle of the stage and proudly pronounced that her studio has released more films theatrically than anyone else. Hard to compete with that at CinemaCon, where points are earned by picking a side in the streaming wars. 

That contrasted strongly with… 

Warner Bros: unsteady on its feet 

The weakest slate of the week, though we give credit to studio chiefs Mike DeLuca and Pam Abdy for holding their heads high on stage despite the ubiquitous press reports that their boss David Zaslav is seeking to replace them. 

That said, with the slate that they put on view, it’s not that hard to see why. Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners” might be a hit – but even his video message to the crowd did not explain what the movie is about except to say something about bluegrass music. 

The $140 million art movie that is Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another” had tongues wagging after a long excerpt of Leonardo DiCaprio in tight closeup doing an unhinged monologue on the telephone. That movie, apparently about a group of revolutionaries getting back together, was also given no set-up, and it’s hard to see it as a broad commercial hit. 

Maggie Gyllenhaal’s “The Bride!” seems like a steep hill to climb as a horror-sci fi movie set in the 1930s, and once again the trailer offered no notion of a plot. 

And then came: Superman. The cast came out with director and DC co-chief James Gunn, and that opening shot of Superman in his suit and cape falling to the ground into deep snow is absolutely beautiful. But the rest of the teaser clip was …. Good. Good enough.

The Superman discussion among Gunn, stars David Corsenswet and Rachel Brosnahan droned on and on without much interest until filmmaker Gunn told a stemwinder about his wacky rescue dog, which apparently inspired the plot of the teaser we saw, with a scruffy Superdog dragging the superhero across the snow to be fixed by a group of robots.  

I had several top studio executives whisper the word “painful” in my ear to describe Warner’s presentation. 

A lot of their former, experienced executives were over at the Amazon-MGM presentation, where production chief Courtney Valenti and marketing boss Sue Kroll – both formerly of Warner – presented a slate that seemed a real throwback to the days of Hollywood’s legacy studios, when the major didn’t only make superhero blockbusters, sci-fi sequels and horror, but actually created entertainment for different audiences: a space drama (the aforementioned “Project Hail Mary”), a revenge thriller by a female Black playwright Aleshea Harris (“Is God Is”), a sci-fi thriller (“Mercy” with Chris Pratt), a #MeToo social drama (“After the Hunt” by Luca Guadagnino with Julia Roberts) and even a gentle comedy about a shepherd played by Wolverine himself, Hugh Jackman, (“Three Bags Full”) looking very bucolic. They will have 14 movies next year. 

Tom Cruise: a talkative legend but still a legend 

When Tom Cruise shows up, you just let him talk. I get it. Paramount’s presentation ended with a beautiful tribute to Cruise’s longtime friend and creative partner, writer/director Chris McQuarrie. Cruise used to come to this conclave regularly, but hasn’t been in many years – maybe because he’s been busy on set making such global hits as “Mission: Impossible” and “Top Gun Maverick.” 

Regardless, the man told some great stories in tribute to his friend, including sharing how many uncredited rewrites of scripts and famous scenes he’s worked on. And then, of course, that led up to the trailer of the supposedly last “Mission” entry, “Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning,” which will be out in May. 

We’ll miss that guy, but something tells me he’s not really going away. 

The tariff curveball

Then on the last day of CinemaCon came a stock market crash unseen since 2020, when the global shock of COVID that devastated movie theaters so badly they’ve yet to recover. The shock came from Trump’s tariffs that sent everyone reeling, left to wonder if a recession (or worse) is imminent, and how that might impact all the well-laid plans to get people back to “going to the movies,” instead of “going to a movie,” as Acuna put it to me. 

Like I say, the movie business just can’t get a break. 

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