Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Dustin Rowles | Film | October 31, 2025
According to a THR box-office piece this month, it’s been the weakest October box office—excluding the pandemic—in 27 years. It’s all the more disappointing after several breakout original films earlier this year, like Weapons, F1, and Sinners.
THR puts part of the blame on the lack of new releases—a hold-over from the writers’ strike—but more than that, it’s just that the October slate failed to strike a chord with moviegoers, beginning with the failure of The Smashing Machine, which managed only $11 million since its release, sending The Rock straight back to franchise fare.
The month is littered with mediocre performances: Roofman ($20 million), Good Fortune ($12 million), Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere ($11 million in its first week), and After the Hunt ($75 million budget) which has so far pulled in… $3 million.
How bad was October? The top film of the month was … Tron: Ares, which has now petered out at $64 million, barely eking past last October’s colossal failure, Joker: Folie à Deux. Even Christopher Nolan’s Tenet managed $55 million in October 2020 during the heart of the pandemic.
It doesn’t hurt that, for a spooky season, the number of spooky films was paltry. It was basically Black Phone 2, and that’s it, compared to last October, which featured Smile 2 and Terrifier 3, and the month’s biggest film, Venom: The Last Dance, which at least boasted a villain more sinister than Scott Eastwood’s character in Colleen Hoover’s Regretting You.
Meanwhile, for what it’s worth, the year’s best film, One Battle After Another—a September release—has amassed $66 million domestic but is now over $210 million worldwide. Still an under-performer relative to its $130 million budget, but not a total loss and may eventually turn a profit after an expected awards-season boost.
There is still one more weekend remaining to help boost the numbers, but big grosses are not expected from this weekend’s new release, Bugonia, and the theatrical re-release of K-Pop Demon Hunters.
