Rotten Tomatoes recently released its list of the most anticipated movies of 2025, and the scenario is bleak.
Out of 28 titles, only seven aren’t part of a franchise. Out of those seven, two are remakes of older classics, leaving us with five truly original new films to look forward to in the next year. Well, according to that list anyway.
Faced with such a depressing prospect, we felt the need to investigate further to see whether Hollywood is really that badly out of ideas, and thankfully there are several creatives still trying to push the envelope in some capacity. Our list shares just two titles with Rotten Tomatoes.
In The Grey (January 17)
Kicking off 2025 in style is Guy Ritchie’s latest. The Snatch director never rests, putting out two television shows and three films just in 2023 and 2024 alone. In the new year, he’s following it up with an action flick packed with stars, including frequent collaborators Henry Cavill, Jake Gyllenhaal, and Eiza González. Rosamund Pike also features. The men play two extraction specialists who have to facilitate the escape of a senior female negotiator, per IMDb. Talking to Deadline, the filmmaker described the film as “both intellectually stimulating and physically exhilarating.”
Mickey 17 (January 31)
We’ve all been anxiously anticipating Bong Joon-Ho’s return to screens following what is one of the best films of the 21st century, the Academy-Award-winning Parasite. Strikes and delays in post-production pushed that day back by almost a year as Mickey 17‘s release date was mysteriously changed from Mar. 29, 2024, to Jan. 31, 2025. The film adapts Edward Ashton’s Mickey7 novel about clone space travelers who are sent to colonize the ice world Niflheim. Pattinson plays the central clones and is joined by Steven Yeun, Naomi Ackie, Toni Collette, and Mark Ruffalo in supporting roles.
With Love (February 7)
Jonathan Eusebio has been Hollywood’s trusted stunt director, coordinator, and choreographer for many years, but now he’s finally stepping into the main role behind the cameras with his directorial debut With Love, starring Oscar-winners Ke Huy Quan, in his first-ever leading role, and Ariana DeBose.
The plot is still being kept under wraps but producers David Leitch and Kelly McCormick say the film is making the most out of Quan’s action chops. “He also has a really amazing glasses move that I can’t really tell you about [Kelly and David laugh] where his spectacles like fly and then land. He does it naturally in like IRL, and we’re gonna take advantage of that superpower [sic]” they told Collider.
Untitled Ryan Coogler film (March 7)
Now this one is probably top of this writer’s personal list of 2025 prospects. Ryan Coogler directing the cameras that capture Michael B. Jordan has long been proven a recipe for success, so the idea of them making a period film that is also a vampire thriller sounds almost too cool to be true. Still untitled, and highly secretive, this upcoming project is both directed and penned by Coogler for Warner Bros., and also stars Jack O’Connell, Delroy Lindo, Omar Benson Miller, Jayme Lawson, Wunmi Mosaku, Li Jun Li, and Hailee Steinfeld.
Love Me (early 2025)
Love Me might have technically premiered in 2024, but it will only find its way to the screens of non-Sundance Film Festival attendees in the new year. The post-apocalyptic romance drama wasn’t exactly embraced by critics at the festival, but its premise and leading duo are just fascinating enough to keep the flame of curiosity alive.
Kristen Stewart and Steven Yeun, also known as two of the best working young actors of their generation, play an unusual couple made up of a buoy and a satellite who meet online and fall in love long after the extinction of the human race. It tackles all the complicated and anxiety-inducing implications of human connection in a technological world.
BC Project (August 8)
Paul Thomas Anderson’s upcoming film is still being referred to by its working title BC Project. Rumored to be based on Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland but transporting its 80s Reagan setting to modern America, the movie marks PTA’s first collaboration with Leonardo DiCaprio which is exciting in and of itself.
Unconfirmed and unofficial plot details say the 49-year-old actor plays the adoptive father of Sean Penn and Regina Hall’s child. Penn is rumored to be playing the leader of a white supremacist group desperate to get rid of an interracial baby he had with Hall’s character. Musicians Alana Haim, Teyana Taylor, and Shayna McHayle (AKA Junglepussy) round up the cast.
Him (September 19)
While Jordan Peeles works to create his much-anticipated fourth film, his production team is growing by the minute by purchasing some of Hollywood’s most refreshing and exciting projects. Following 2023’s Monkey Man, Monkeypaw Productions is turning its efforts to Him, a psychological horror film previously titled GOAT, which stars Marlon Wayans as a legendary quarterback tasked with training a rising talent, played by Tyriq Withers. The Justin Tipping-directed movie also features Julia Fox, Tim Heidecker, comedian Jim Jefferies, and hip-hop stars Guapdad 4000 and Tierra Whack in their feature film debuts.
The History of Sound (Unknown)
For this next section of our list, allow us to go down a Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor rabbit hole. The two incredibly talented actors from across the pond are booked and busy for the upcoming year and we could not be more excited to watch these projects.
The only one that managed to nab them both, however, was Oliver Hermanus’s The History of Sound in which they will play a couple, who fall in love while traveling together to capture World War I stories and songs.
Hamnet (Unknown)
There aren’t many things in film as exciting as rising stars pairing up with a leading new-generation director, which is exactly what is happening in Hamnet, an upcoming film by Oscar winner Chlóe Zhao that adapts Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel Hamnet about William Shakespeare’s son, who died at age 11. Mescal plays the English playwright, while Buckley plays Shakespeare’s wife Agnes/Anne Hathaway.
Per Deadline, “The novel charts the emotional, familial and artistic consequences of that loss, bringing to life a human and heart-stopping story as the backdrop to the creation of The Bard’s Hamlet.”
Separate Rooms (Unknown)
Another director who does not rest is Luca Guadagnino (After the Hunt, a thriller directed by the Italian set in the world of academia and starring Andrew Garfield and Julia Roberts could just as easily have been featured on this list, but that one is more likely to come out in 2026).
Hot off the widespread acclaim of the fantastic sports drama Challengers, Guadagnino and O’Connor are pairing up again in Separate Rooms, where the actor will play an irreverent Italian writer named Leo who develops a romance with his translator Thomas. O’Connor previously acted predominantly in Italian in his other 2024 film, La Chimera. The film, which adapts the 1989 novel by the late author Pier Vittorio Tondelli, only has one other name attached as of now — none other than Léa Seydoux — in an undisclosed role.