Hollywood's franchise frenzy: More than half of top studios' 2025 movies are existing IP

Hollywood's franchise frenzy is only just beginning.

The 2024 box office has been inundated with sequels, prequels and remakes, with the top 10 titles of the year all coming from existing intellectual property. That trend will continue, and expand, in 2025.

The industry's top studios are returning to familiar characters and settings to drive movie ticket sales, a strategy that is hardly new, but seems to be growing exponentially.

Looking at the current 2025 calendar, between 50% and 70% of the movies from the six major studios — Universal, Disney, Warner Bros., Paramount, Sony and Lionsgate — will be related to existing IP. Of course, the 2025 slate is not totally set in stone and studios could add more non-franchise titles in the coming months and into next year.

"There's been a recognition by studios that the known commodities are what most audiences gravitate toward," said Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst at Comscore.

Of the top 20 highest-grossing domestic releases of 2024, only two are considered original content — Paramount's "IF" and Neon's "Longlegs."

The rest are predominately sequels to major blockbuster features, new and old, or tied to a popular book (Sony's "It Ends With Us"), television show (Universal's "The Fall Guy") or based on a popular historical figure (Paramount's "Bob Marley: One Love").

Even before Hollywood was disrupted by the pandemic and the meteoric rise of streaming content, the domestic box office was heavily reliant on franchise titles. For Universal, Warner Bros., Sony, Lionsgate, Paramount and 20th Century Fox (which had not yet merged with Disney), franchise films accounted for between 33% and 62% of total releases in 2019. Disney was the only outlier, with nine of its 10 films coming