Movie Theaters Just Experienced Their Lowest Box Office Month in Almost 30 Years

October 2025 is going to be one for the box office record books, but not in a good way. Week after week, there have been headlines about the underperformance of October’s highest-profile releases, like Tron: Ares, The Smashing Machine, Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere, and After the Hunt. With Mortal Kombat 2 being delayed from October 24 to May 2026, it left a fatality-sized hole in the release schedule.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, the analytics company Comscore reports that the October 2025 box office generated $425 million in revenue, the worst for that month in 27 years. This does not include October 2020, when Tenet was released and generated $55 million for theaters during the heart of the COVID-19 pandemic, as many theaters were unable to open. THR notes that the last time October was this low was 1997, though that year notably featured the breakout hit I Know What You Did Last Summer, which dominated a rather slow month, as well as the release of the critically acclaimed Boogie Nights. October 1997 generated $385.2 million in combined ticket sales, not adjusted for inflation.

What Happened to the Box Office in October?

A24

October used to be considered a slower season, except for that one breakout horror film that followed the summer movie season but preceded the holiday rush. Studios tended to take advantage by slowly releasing some of their potential Oscar contenders, such as The Social Network and Gone Girl. However, it then became a month that delivered huge box-office numbers with the right title. Venom, Joker, A Star is Born, Gravity, and Halloween all generated summer blockbuster-level numbers over the past decade in the month of October. This year’s big tentpole film, Tron: Ares, was hugely disappointing, grossing only $63 million since its October 10 release. It’s even worse when one considers that it is the highest-grossing film of October. Meanwhile, audiences didn’t turn out for The Smashing Machine or Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere the same way they had in the past for other films aiming for awards buzz.

Theaters certainly are thankful for Taylor Swift’s last-minute The Official Release Party of a Showgirl to the October slate, as the three-day event brought in $34 million domestically during the first month of the year. Even though Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc didn’t break out the same way that Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba- The Movie – Infinity Castle did, the fact that it managed to top the weekend box office with just $18 million shows how lackluster the October offerings have been for audiences. The one bona fide hit for October was, of course, a horror film. The Black Phone 2 was released on October 17 and grossed $51 million domestically, a bounce-back from the disappointing run of flops Blumhouse has had in 2025.

How this could have been avoided is unclear. Maybe Disney should have released Predator: Badlands in October instead of November. Had Netflix committed to a large theatrical rollout for Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, it likely could have been a box office hit that audiences wanted to see in theaters before Halloween. October 2026 could see a bounce back, with The Social Network sequel, The Social Reckoning, releasing alongside a new Street Fighter film and The Legend of Aang: The Last Airbender, the feature film sequel to the popular animated series. That said, if 2025 has revealed anything, it is that nothing is guaranteed to be a hit.

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