The "Matties": Part 1

Oscar night at IPH and handing out some box office awards from 2025

The 98th Annual Academy Awards released their nominations, which you can peruse by clicking here. The biggest takeaways are Sinners leads the way with a record sixteen nominations, and still I have no clue what constitutes Best Casting yet. My good friend, the “Movie Muse” Dana Gillis, and I will dive much deeper into each category in our email exchange over the next month, breaking down the selections, so stay tuned.

Speaking of red carpets, the movie night of the year is happening again over at the Independent Picture House on March 15th. Their annual Oscar fundraiser tickets are selling fast and are, without a doubt, the best way for true cinephiles to gather for Hollywood’s big night. Click here for information and to buy a ticket to the year’s most fun celebration of film. Now onto some more made-up awards!

2025’s Cinematic Superlatives: “The Matties”

When every film has been viewed, logged, and reviewed, we are left with plenty of trends. The Matties are an amorphous living document where categories change yearly depending on what was in vogue on the big screen. This is a showcase meant to create a collective moviegoing experience in 2025, leading us to Oscar night. We have ten categories this year and today will highlight three dealing with tinsel town’s favorite metric… ticket sales!

These awards will spread the wealth by bringing in as many films as possible with our nominees. Hopefully you find a couple gems that you can catch out before March 15th. Let’s have some fun and start things off with our Hollywood box office awards.

Biggest Hollywood Trend

2nd Runner Up: Dual acting roles, which stretched from sci-fi (Predator: Badlands) to horror (Sinners) to foreign dramas (The Secret Agent), raking up piles of cash as well as awards nominations.

1st Runner Up: The trauma and toll of raising a child. Jessie Buckley (Hamnet), Rose Byrne (If I Had Legs I’d Kick You), Jennifer Lawrence (Die My Love), and Amanda Seyfried (The Testament of Ann Lee) all experienced the heartbreaking nature of motherhood in their films. Their love, grief, and frustration made for some of the best individual performances of the past five years.

Winner: Political commentary in film. This year featured outright political films such as Eddington, focusing on the political polarization of America as well as It Was Just an Accident, which tapped into authoritarianism in Iran. Many stories sprinkled politically charged vibes throughout, like One Battle After Another, Wake Up Dead Man, and even the reboot of Superman. Sinners took aim at systemic racism and cultural exploitation, while Bugonia went as far as singling out “big tech” as aliens. Hell, even Materialists went after wage gap disparity and the social media perception of love in today’s dating world. Social commentary is the bread and butter of many scripts, and our society today has more than enough cannon fodder to keep going for the next three years. The real question will be if moviegoers are exhausted by this rhetoric by then.

Surprise Hit of the Year

2nd Runner Up: A Minecraft Movie seemed like a decent idea. It had a built-in audience and fun actors like Jason Momoa, as well as seemingly everyone under fifteen’s favorite actor, Jack Black. We did not see “chicken jockey” coming, or the cultural phenomenon that almost cleared one billion dollars worldwide. Warner Bros. has already greenlit #2.

1st Runner Up: The Conjuring: Last Rites became the highest-grossing entry in the highest-grossing horror franchise of all time, raking in $458 million worldwide. Why is this a surprise, you may ask? Well, this movie is really a long slog overall and doesn’t come close to the scary heights of The Conjuring 2. Never doubt horror fans.

Winner: Speaking of horror franchises, our winner is Final Destination: Bloodlines, the sixth installment of the series. There were no indicators this would be their highest-grossing film, bringing in an incredible $315 million worldwide. The best part is that it’s really fun and a great return to the slapstick, gory Rube Goldberg machine of death we’ve come to expect from the original.

Box Office Bomb

2nd Runner Up: After the Hunt was being heralded as an Oscar-worthy entry featuring Julia Roberts and Luca Guadagnino (Challengers) on a $70 million budget. Lukewarm reviews mixed with a baffling script ended with a paltry $9.4 million worldwide.

1st Runner Up: Coming hot off of a Glen Powell wave, stylish director Edgar Wright thought it was best to remake an ’80s cult classic with zero of the fun camp that made the original so rewatchable. The end result? After a reported $110 million budget, The Running Man worldwide tally settled at $68 million. Powell may be a better character actor than a lead, and Edgar Wright will most likely find himself in movie jail for a stretch.

Winner: Snow White. Creating a live-action remake of a 1937 classic film should seem like a no-brainer. Casting controversies of a non-white lead labeled the film “woke” from its outset. The replacement of the seven dwarves with CGI versions mixed with a shift from the original love story put the worst parts of the internet to work, dooming the film before its release. On a reported $350 million-plus budget, it brought in $205 million worldwide. With films such as Lilo & Stitch grossing over a billion dollars this year, don’t expect live-action remakes to go anywhere soon.

We are just getting warmed up with seven more categories to go. In part two we’ll shift over from the box office and focus on some of the best individual musical performances, production designs, and action set pieces of the year. We’ll also re-examine some uncomfortably tense scenes, WTF moments, and actors who stole the show in 2025. Thank you for reading The Matties here at Y’all Weekly and come back next week for the awards conclusion.