Today Comscore announced UK and Ireland box office results for 2025 exceeded £1bn for the third consecutive post-pandemic year. Box office receipts for the territory reached £1.07bn in 2025, up 1% on 2024, achieving the strongest post-pandemic result to date for the home nations. Final territory admissions figures will follow later in the month.
1,092 new titles were released in UK and Irish cinemas during 2025 (vs. 1,124 in 2024). Family friendly game adaptation A Minecraft Movie (£57m) was the year’s top grosser; followed by British comedy Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy (£46m) and musical sequel Wicked: For Good (£46m); with live-action remake Lilo & Stitch (£37m) and action adventure sequel Jurassic World Rebirth (£36m) rounding out the year’s top five releases. The top ten pictures accounted for 33% of overall box office in the territory.
Universal was the no.1 distributor generating £269m in box office – the highest distributor total since 2019 – achieving a market share of 25%. From 35 new titles, Universal scored three of the year’s top ten films as well as releasing family friendly flicks How to Train Your Dragon and The Bad Guys 2; horror films Nosferatu and Five Nights at Freddy’s 2; fine British fare Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale and The Ballad of Wallis Island; as well as stylish dramas The Brutalist, Black Bag and Bugonia.
Walt Disney took second place for 2025 with £247m box office and a market share of 23%. From 23 new titles, releases included animations Elio and Zootropolis 2; action fantasies Avatar: Fire and Ash and Predator: Badlands; superhero adventures The Fantastic Four: First Steps and Thunderbolts*; comedies The Roses and A Real Pain; and music biopics A Complete Unknown and Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere. Walt Disney also landed four of the year’s top ten films.
Warner Bros. came in third with £197m box office and a 19% market share, scoring two films in the top 10 including no.1 film A Minecraft Movie. Their 21 strong slate of releases included big screen action flicks F1 The Movie and Superman; triumphantly off-beat comedy action opus’s One Battle After Another and Mickey 17; action thrillers The Accountant 2 and A Working Man; as well as a fleet of high concept horrors including Sinners, Weapons, The Conjuring: Last Rites and Presence.
Final global box office totals are still being collated at time of publishing with Gower Street Analytics estimating 2025’s worldwide gross at $33.6bn (vs. $30.0bn in 2024), a welcome rise of 12% year-on-year. Walt Disney was the top grossing studio globally, amassing $6.6bn in box office, the biggest result posted by any studio since 2019. The UK and Ireland held firm as the leading European territory and posted a 4% global market share from just 1% of the world’s population.
More information on 2025 box office can found in Comscore’s box office review and for an early look at what 2026 has in store for the sector both at home and abroad, see Gower Street’s predictions.