August box office drops by a fifth amid weak family offerings
August box office in the UK and Ireland totalled £95.2m, according to latest figures from Comscore.
This is 21% lower than in August 2024, when Deadpool & Wolverine, Despicable Me 4 and It Ends with Us drove a total of £120.5m.
“The film slate this [August] just wasn’t as strong as the film slate last year,” commented Tom Linay, content business director at cinema sales house Digital Cinema Media.
Still, year-to-date box office revenue is up 9% year on year, surpassing £735m. Linay estimated that admissions for the year to date are also up around 5%. Official admissions figures are released later in the month.
August’s top film was July holdover The Fantastic Four: First Steps, which earned £11.1m in the month for a total gross of £23.4m, making it the seventh-highest-grossing film of 2025 thus far.
A number of other July titles also cracked the top 10, including The Bad Guys 2 (£8.8m in August), Jurassic World Rebirth (£5.3m), Superman (£4.9m) and Smurfs (£2m).
Horror mystery Weapons had the second-biggest August (£10.9m) and is already one of the most successful horror flicks in recent years. Of films rated 18-plus, it is the second-highest-grossing since the Covid-19 lockdowns were lifted, behind 2022’s Smile (£11.6m).
Other top films in August include Disney’s Freakier Friday (£7.8m) and The Roses (£3.8m), Akiva Schaffer’s Naked Gun reboot (£7.3m) and Celine Song romance Materialists (£3.5m).
Linay attributed August’s performance to a “weak” collection of family films.
“This summer, the family films haven’t connected in the way that they usually do,” he explained, citing the underwhelming performance of Smurfs, The Bad Guys 2 and Elio.
Savvy cinemas like Cineworld nevertheless lured audiences in during the summer holidays with a number of offers, which drove greater admissions at the cost of box office revenue for several family titles. According to Linay, attendance figures will thus be “better than box office” relative to last year.
September preview: Wide variety, shallow potential
September arguably lacks a tentpole film to drive mass cinemagoing, but there is a greater variety compared with September last year, when Beetlejuice Beetlejuice practically carried the month.
Horror title The Conjuring: Last Rites debuts this weekend, continuing a strong string of films in the genre this year including Nosferatu, Sinners, 28 Years Later, Final Destination Bloodlines and Weapons.
The Conjuring is followed by the third Downton Abbey film, Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale, and comedy sequel Spinal Tap II: The End Continues, which are both released on 12 September.
During the final weekend of the month, Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another brings a lift to film buffs.
