Instead of a typical reflection piece, I’ve decided to let you all know what my most-popular pieces of 2025 were (excluding listicles like my very wrong box-office predictions or top 10 TV shows), as I think they capture the year in entertainment fairly well. Below are the headlines/links to each story, along with a short excerpt. As always, thanks for reading!
Let’s get into it:
“I’m actually putting my fan hat on today rather than my business hat. This newsletter has always been about marrying the two, but I tend to lean more towards the latter; ‘Thunderbolts,’ though, has renewed my interest in the future of the MCU so much that I’m going to spend this newsletter channeling my comic nerd knowledge.”
“I’ve written about the diminishing returns of the Disney+ TV shows and their dwindling viewership. ‘The Acolyte’ was quickly canceled and there’s hardly a peep about ‘Skeleton Crew’ (which I actually enjoyed). It has yet to chart on Nielsen’s weekly streaming rankings … That’s what happens when you run a franchise into the ground. Disney is obviously going to back away from the onslaught of TV shows (after spending the last half-decade turning Star Wars into Star Trek), but is it too late?”
“These remakes largely serve no purpose to stimulate Disney IP beyond the few that have made a lot of money (and the few others that have actually been decent). They do nothing for the Disney brand beyond maybe reminding people that the much better originals exist, which are now readily available with the click of a button.”
“The layoffs at Alamo raised an eyebrow because they come just half a year after Sony Pictures Entertainment bought the company — the first such acquisition after the “Paramount Decree” sunset in 2020, allowing a movie studio to more easily buy a theater chain. Another wrinkle to this: The NYC layoffs occurred amid bargaining of a new contract between Alamo and NYC Alamo union…
“I’ve written at length about how the movie business is in desperate need of new franchises to support the future, as the old guard — from Transformers to Fast and Furious to even the MCU — run their course. Audiences have shown an appetite for fresh stories on the big screen post-pandemic, but ‘Sinners’ is the first big post-pandemic hit that is a purely original story…”
“There’s obviously a strategy to time comic releases to movie releases; that’s probably not new, but it does seem even more prevalent in recent years. The series never last that long, which makes sense if the only publishing incentive is to cash in on movies without any long-term creative goal or vision.”
“Animated family movies were the top movies at both the box office (‘Inside Out 2’) and on streaming in the US (‘Moana’) [in 2024] … And yet, Hollywood’s investment in kids content is slowing.”
If ‘Fire and Ash’ performs on par with the first two movies, the Avatar franchise would surpass the likes of Batman and X-Men as one of the 10 biggest movie franchises ever — after only three movies. Here’s more perspective: Do you know how hard it is for an original movie to not only become one of the highest-grossing movies of all time, but also spawn a sequel that also becomes one of the highest-grossing movies of all time? VERY hard!”
“I wrote in 2022, when I reported at Business Insider, that cracks in Marvel’s armor were starting to show. I wrote that as the franchise grew, audiences would likely become more selective about what they consume. And that appears to be exactly what’s happening.”
“At any rate, this is a fascinating look at the dichotomy between different screen mediums: the interactive nature of video games versus the week-to-week waiting for a TV series. How will fans of the game respond to the show? Unlike Amazon’s ‘Fallout,’ which told a new story set in the same world as the games, ‘The Last of Us’ is adapting the same story…”
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source travisclark.substack.com ’
