Wicked: Comes good. Year-to-date total box office surpasses £965m – up 2% on strong 2024
November box office for the UK and Ireland totaled £85m, a 33% decline from last November against a challenging comparable.
Year-to-date, total box office gross has surpassed £965m, running 2% ahead of 2024 and 1% behind 2023.
The top film of the month, Wicked: For Good, grossed £34.4m across its first two weeks, with its £18.8m debut the highest-grossing opening of the year (and highest-ever for a musical). The title is already the fifth-highest-grossing film of the year, and has a chance of unseating A Minecraft Movie (£56.9m) as 2025’s top film.
It was followed by Disney’s Zootropolis 2 (Zootopia 2 in other markets), which grossed £7.5m. Its £5.9m opening was the largest for an animated title this year.
Other top films included Now You See Me: Now You Don’t (£5.8m) and Predator: Badlands (£5.4m).
Tom Linay, content business director at cinema sales house Digital Cinema Media, said November was a good month for cinemagoing even if it failed to live up to the “tough comp[arable]” of last November.
He estimated attendance was also down for the month, though likely “not down as much as box office”. Official admissions figures will be released in mid-December.
“It’s been a really good month, it’s just last November was amazing”, Linay added.
November 2024 included the release of the first Wicked (£32.3m), Paddington in Peru (£27.7m), Gladiator 2 (£24.8m) and Moana 2 (£14.6m).
While this November had a higher-performing Wicked and a high-quality family film in Zootropolis 2, the lack of additional tentpole titles was cited by Linay as the key reason for the year-on-year decline.
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2025 is rounded out with a variety of major releases, led by Disney’s Avatar sequel Fire and Ash, which opens on 19 December.
Other titles to watch include horror sequel Five Nights At Freddy’s 2 (5 December), Timothy Chalament table tennis biopic Marty Supreme (26 December), Sydney Sweeney thriller The Housemaid (22 December) and award-season favourite Sentimental Value (26 December).
Linay expressed additional optimism for this year’s slew of Christmas titles, which include horror title Silent Night, Deadly Night (12 December) and animated film Super Elfkins (19 December).
