The best upcoming movies in 2025

The Monkey

James Wan, Osgood Perkins and Stephen King is one heck of a horror triple threat, and The Monkey is the result. Based on a 1980 short story written by King, the film (written and directed by Longlegs’ Perkins, and produced by Wan) follows the lives of twin brothers who apparently unleash a deadly curse after discovering a clockwork toy in the attic. Years later, the now estranged brothers are forced to reconcile when the curse reappears.

Theo James, Elijah Wood and Tatiana Maslany star in a low(ish) budget horror that looks like a cross between Final Destination and It.

Release date: 21 February 2025

Sinners

Fruitvale Station, Black Panther and Creed director Ryan Coogler reunites once again with Michael B. Jordan for this period horror movie, the plot details of which are being kept tightly under wraps. The trailer suggests that Jordan plays twin brothers, at least one of whom teams up with a group of 1930s Deep South townsfolk to fight off some kind of supernatural threat. If we had to guess, we’d say it looks like vampires.

Filmed with IMAX cameras and boasting a strong cast including Hailee Steinfeld, Jack O’Connell, Wunmi Mosaku and Delroy Lindo, Sinners is shaping up to be a bombastic horror – just the thing to liven up what is traditionally a quiet time of the year for movie releases.

Release date: 7 March 2025

Mickey 17

Parasite director Bong Joon-Ho’s third English language movie (following Snowpiercer and Okja) is another sci-fi satire seeking to blend pitch-black humour with deft social commentary and hard-hitting violence. Robert Pattinson stars as Mickey, a man who has signed up to be an ‘expendable’ – a disposable test subject killed in the name of furthering humanity’s scientific progress. And not just once, either – he will be regenerated via 3D printing to perish again in another awful way.

With a cast that also includes Toni Collette, Naomi Ackie, Mark Ruffalo and Steven Yuen, this promises to be one of the cinematic highlights of early 2025.

Release date: 7 March 2025

The Electric State

Based on Simon Stålenhag’s graphic novel of the same name, this Netflix sci-fi is set in an alternate 1990s where the relationship between humans and robots has become… complicated. The movie seems to have deviated strongly from the source material’s vision, however, becoming a star-studded action-comedy with the sort of wisecracks and emotional beats you’d expect from Joe and Anthony Russo.

The brothers, who directed Avengers: Endgame and The Gray Man, don’t exactly do subtlety, and the casting of the likes of Millie Bobby Brown and Chris Pratt seems to suggest they’re going big and brash rather than wistful and melancholic. Ah well, at least the effects look good…

Release date: 14 March 2025

Black Bag

A long-serving British intelligence agent (Michael Fassbender) is forced to choose between loyalty to his country or his marriage when his wife (also a spy, and played by Cate Blanchett) falls under suspicion. Is she a double agent? And if so, can he do what must be done to the woman he adores? Steven Soderbergh’s stylish espionage caper also stars Pierce Brosnan, Regé-Jean Page and Tom Burke, and with a script by legendary screenwriter David Koepp, we’re expecting this one to be a crowd-pleasing suspense thriller rather than a plodding experimental arthouse movie.

Release date: 14 March 2025

The Alto Knights

Robert De Niro plays dual lead roles in this mafia movie about the notorious real-life rivalry between New York mobsters Frank Costello and Vito Genovese. Once childhood besties, the pair ended up embroiled in a bloody feud that threatened to tear Manhattan’s underworld apart. And this film promises to dive deep into the story.

There’s some outstanding gangster moviemaking DNA behind The Alto Knights, too: De Niro needs no introduction, despite some of his recent form; the director is Barry Levinson, who’s been turning out some strong examples of Hollywood cinema (Rain Main, Sleepers, Bugsy) since the early 1980s; and the screenwriter is Nicholas Pileggi, best known for co-writing the Martin Scorsese mob classics Casino and Goodfellas.

Release date: 21 March 2025

Death of a Unicorn

After accidentally hitting what appears to be a unicorn with their car, a man and his daughter attempt to make the best of the situation – by bringing the creature’s body to the man’s big pharma CEO boss in order that its miraculous physiology can be exploited for financial gain.

This is an A24-produced black comedy with a huge dollop of horror thrown in so, as you can imagine, the results of this decision don’t go well. The trailer above hints at the carnage that ensues, as well as showing off the movie’s star-studded cast.

Release date: 28 March 2025

The Accountant 2

The first Accountant, released way back in 2016, has morph from also-ran action thriller to minor cult classic over the years; it shouldn’t have been good, but it was. That being said, we were still a little shocked to see the announcement of this full-blown sequel, which reunites Ben Affleck’s Christian Wolff (mercurial accountant to the criminal underworld and sometime elite sniper) with Jon Bernthal’s Braxton Wolff (trained killer and security specialist – and Christian’s estranged brother). Yes, the plot seems pretty daft and by-the-numbers (no pun intended), but the interplay between the brothers looks more than enough to carry the film to its undoubtedly bloody and bullet-strewn conclusion.

Release date: 25 April 2025

Thunderbolts*

An Avengers-style team of superheroes made up of misfits, scoundrels and barely reformed villains? Yes, we’ve seen this before (twice!) with D.C.’s Suicide Squad films, but Thunderbolts* is Marvel’s own take on the sub-genre – with all that that entails, for better or worse.

With the MCU’s star seemingly on the wane following a succession of disappointing releases, there’s a lot riding on this film. Can it bring back the franchise’s good old days, or has the whole cinematic universe become so convoluted, generic and ‘safe’ that it’s simply collapsing in on itself in an artistic version of the Big Rip?

And no, we don’t really know what the title’s asterisk is for – but we imagine we’ll find out once we’ve seen the film.

Release date: 2 May 2025

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning

A prolific film franchise that goes back almost 30 years – with the same lead actor?! Love them, hate them or generally just find them a bit middling, there’s no denying that the Mission: Impossible movies are blockbusters of the highest order. And in a time where such movies are increasingly scarce, there’s something about a big marquee release that genuinely gets is excited for a trip to the cinema.

This is the eighth M:I movie, and potentially the last, rounding off the story started by Tom Cruise and company way back in 1996. But it’d be unwise to be against the 62-year-old Cruise returning to the role of super-agent Ethan Hunt again – after all, Harrison Ford has been playing Indiana Jones well into his 70s.

Release date: 23 May 2025

28 Years Later

Danny Boyle’s long-awaited sequel to his pioneering twists on the zombie genre 28 Days Later and 28 Weeks Later, this all-new story centres on the remnants of humanity that cling to existence almost three decades since the rage virus outbreak began.

Details of the story are thin, and the trailer above is an all-too-rare masterpiece of ‘vibes over plot exposition’, but we do know that it boasts an excellent cast stacked with the likes of Jodie Comer, Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Ralph Fiennes, and that it has been filmed, at least partially, on an Apple iPhone. Before you pull out your own device and start thinking about Hollywood stardom, though, consider that the lens Boyle and co have attached to their iPhone costs about as much as your house.

Release date: 20 June 2025

Jurassic World Rebirth

An abandoned island facility that developed the original dinosaurs for the first Jurassic Park now holds the lizards considered too terrible to be in close proximity to the public. And, wouldn’t you know, it’s the one place where our rag-tag team, led by Scarlett Johansson, Jonathan Bailey and Mahershala Ali, must travel to obtain some vital scientific research.

The trailer for this latest Jurassic Park franchise reboot makes Rebirth look like it has a healthy dose of Tomb Raider or Indiana Jones thrown in, perhaps in an effort to take the long-running series in a slightly new direction. Don’t worry, though: there will be plenty of hungry dinosaurs looking to make an easy meal out of our swashbuckling heroes.

Release date: 2 July 2025

Superman

Here’s yet another reboot of the classic American superhero story we all know and (some of us) love. But while it might be hard (and unwise) to get too excited about tripping down the familiar narrative pathway of small-town boy and erstwhile alien refugee Clark Kent finding his way in the big city while saving the world, we’re willing to give this one a chance. It is, after all, directed by James Gunn, who has given us some of the most enjoyable superhero movies of the past decade. Can Gunn restore Superman’s stock after several years of D.C.’s mishandling? We’ll find out in July.

Release date: 11 July 2025