Bracing for Impact: The 2025 Cinema Wagon Is Here

2025’s Cinema Forecast: Cloudy With A Chance Of Clichés

Rahul Desai compiles a tongue-in-cheek guide to navigating the promises, pitfalls, and puzzling patterns we’re likely to encounter in 2025’s cinematic landscape.

2025 IS HERE and so are the (very useful) lists of all the hotly anticipated movies and music and TV shows this year. I always have a glance, get excited, rant a bit and then go back to writing the review of a film or series nobody's watching. It’s a nice routine. For one moment, I have something to look forward to, or not look forward to. The future is bright, dark and everything in between. But there’s also this urge to be brutally honest about expectations from contemporary art. Especially global cinema, given that so much of it is an ‘escape’ for an Indian film critic trying to keep up with 20 cultural ways of storytelling parading as one country. So this time, I’m giving into that urge and this is the totally-not-misanthropic result:

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Indian Standard Time (IST)

Some of us in South Asia can pretend like we care about awards season, but we don’t really care about awards season until the contenders actually release in cinemas here in that awkward period between the Golden Globes and the Oscars. So I can wax hopeful about 2025, but hey, I’m still waiting (legally) on a bunch of critically acclaimed gems from 2024: Nosferatu, Nickel Boys, Conclave, A Real Pain, Babygirl, Maria, A Complete Unknown, The Brutalist. India might be ahead of the West in terms of physical time, but that certainly does not apply to the theatrical calendar. Anora, too, was announced but duly scrapped without warning. I mean I watched All of Us Strangers in April of 2024. So my real movie-desiring year only begins this March.

The Superman-shaped Problem

Other than Deadpool & Wolverine, it was a Marvel-less 2024 (see what I did there?), which I was personally very pleased about. But that can only mean one thing: Marvel, DC and its countless multiverses are lining up for 2025. For starters, we need to talk about the new Superman — set for a big July release. Directed by Guardians of the Galaxy mastermind James Gunn, it stars David Corenswet as the iconic comic-book superhero. The strange-looking teaser dropped recently and James Gunn fanboys (is that a thing?) went up against jilted Zack Snyder fanboys on X. To be honest, the teaser did look like the teaser for any rebooted Superman franchise. Do we really need a reboot though? Why can’t creators actually think of what it’s like for Superman to grow old or something? Is the Earth of 2025 no different from that of 1979 or 2006? Why is it that the same story needs to be told again and again to bemuse new generations of children and moviegoers? Go figure. Or actually don’t. The last time we figured, a live-action Lion King franchise was born. It’ll be a toss-up between Captain America: Brave New World and Superman and Fantastic Four — and there are no winners.

Cinephilia Central

2025 offers a sprawling buffet of new films by Bong Joon Ho, Paul Thomas Anderson, Edgar Wright, Danny Boyle (!), James Cameron, Steven Soderbergh, Ryan Coogler and Yorgos Lanthimos. Not to mention the film festival breakouts at Cannes, Berlin, Sundance and Venice. It’ll be Christmas for cinephiles every other day. But if you get a cinephile like me drunk and vulnerable, I’m going to tell you that I’m only living to watch Paddington in Peru (my personal 2026 Oscar pick), Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, Happy Gilmore 2, the I Know What You Did Last Summer “requel” (reboot+sequel), Freakier Friday, the trashy new Jurassic World title starring Scarlett Johannson, Zootopia 2, John Wick: Ballerina. If you get me tipsier, I’ll put my life savings on Tom Cruise finally winning that Oscar for the last Mission Impossible movie. And on Avatar 3 flopping. And on the third Knives Out movie being three too many.

The F1 Question

My personal most anticipated Hollywood film of the year is the supremely unimaginatively titled F1, starring Brad Pitt as a veteran Formula One driver who comes out of retirement. It’s directed by Joseph Kosinski, the man behind Top Gun: Maverick, so I expect F1 to be a fun cross between the guilty pleasures of Driven (2001) and the cinematic gravity of Rush (2013) and Ford v Ferrari (2019). It’s not an easy sport to film, but the timing is great, because Netflix’s docuseries F1: Drive to Survive has turned an entire generation of kids into motor-racing fans. What can possibly go wrong?

Zombies v/s Dinosaurs

Danny Boyle’s zombie-horror, post-apocalyptic thriller 28 Years Later (written by Alex Garland) sees him returning to home territory — the third film of the 28 Days Later series and the franchise's first film since 2007. It’s back to the pavilion for Boyle, who’s struggled to maintain that golden era of British filmmaking since. The star cast is nuts: Jodie Comer, Ralph Fiennes, Aaron Taylor-Johnson and newly minted Oscar winner Cillian Murphy. I’ve grown fond of zombies over the years, but my childhood kills me every time I look away from the good old dinosaurs of the Jurassic Park universe. The prehistoric creatures are simply more expressive and cuter, and it doesn’t matter who’s directing the Jurassic World film, it’s a matter of time before the Academy introduces a creature-acting category. I know who — or what — I’m voting for. And it won’t be the live-action Snow White, co-written by Greta Gerwig and starring Gal Gadot as the Evil Queen. But it might just be Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein. So many creatures, such little time.

Prayers and Dreams

While the new Batman movie has been pushed to 2043 (or 2026, whichever comes sooner) and the new James Bond may or may not be Joseph Quinn or Josh O’Connor or Callum Turner, it doesn’t hurt to wish for the stars. For instance, can someone please cast superstar-elect Glenn Powell in a new Ocean’s 11 (called Ocean’s 14?) sequel? Can someone prepone the making and release of Sam Mendes’ Beatles biopics from 2027 to 2025 so we can have more of Paul Mescal and Harris Dickinson play Paul McCartney and John Lennon sooner? Can someone — preferably Luca Guadagnino himself — puncture the cash-grabbing-sequel curse and really make a proper Challengers sequel? Can Christopher Nolan tell us about his spat with Hans Zimmer? Can someone continue making Scream reboots and sequels till we run out of slasher-flick runway? Can Nicolas Cage take his wild phase a notch higher and play the crocodile in a Lake Placid prequel? Can the new Anaconda movie merge universes with Madame Web in the Amazon jungles? And finally, can Ridley Scott team up with Clint Eastwood to make a coming-of-old-age drama about two filmmakers who remake all their previous films in their 90s?

The Dark Horse(s)

Of all the one-line premises that sound ultra-thrilling in this new year, is there any cooler than Soderbergh’s new film: A ghost story…told from the perspective of the ghost. How did nobody think of this alt-shift-perspective gimmick before in arguably the most inventive American genre out there? Forget found-footage, screenlife and supernatural horror, Presence is right on par with SS Rajamouli’s audacity to make a film from the perspective of a fly. Who said Westerners aren’t influenced by Indian cinema? There’s also the long-overdue comeback of Oscar winner Ke Huy Quan (from Everything Everywhere All At Once) in Love Hurts, an action film from the makers of John Wick. Colour me desperate.

Show Business

I know the third White Lotus season is set in Thailand, but I’m waiting for the fifth one to be set in a Goan resort where brash Delhiites push local Konkani staff to the brink at a luxury resort. Zoya Akhtar to direct. I’ve also been waiting for Severance Season 2 for so long that now I have to rewatch and re-understand Severance Season 1 after finishing Bad Sisters 2, Slow Horses 4 and Industry 3. Life is short. I just hope Michael Bay doesn’t decide to remake Succession — or worse, The Wire (with robots).

The Tom Cruise Farewell

His body can probably handle another ten Mission Impossible instalments, but he has to act mortal for the rest of us — otherwise, we’ll all realise that he’s just the real-world protagonist of The Man From Earth (look it up). Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning this year will be the last Ethan Hunt adventure in which everyone knows Hunt’s death is inevitable but we’ll act just as shocked as we did at the end of No Time To Die. It’s going to be a blockbuster either way, after the disappointing reception of the penultimate one. And Cruise will then go back to working with Spielberg, Scorsese, Kubrick (or maybe not), and perhaps even tempt Nolan into casting him as the fourth supporting lead in his next.

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