‘Superman’ Soars With Massive Opening Day, Scores 2025’s Second-Biggest Debut

It’s a strong start for DC’s newest take on the Man of Steel. The new Superman movie just hit theaters and made a big splash with a $56.5 million opening day, including early screenings. That’s the second-biggest single-day box office total of 2025 so far, just behind A Minecraft Movie, and slightly ahead of Lilo & Stitch. It played in over 4,100 theaters.

What helped boost that number was the early access showing on Tuesday for Amazon Prime members. These early screenings gave Superman a head start before the regular Thursday night opening.

The film, which was written and directed by James Gunn had early projections landing somewhere around $100 million for its opening weekend.

But now, it looks like it’ll finish closer to $120 million. Some people were even expecting it to go beyond $140 million just a day before the premiere. Part of the reason it’s earning so much is that fans are paying extra for Imax and other premium formats.

Warner Bros. has been on a roll lately at the box office, starting with the release of A Minecraft Movie in April. But Superman is more than just another big release. It’s supposed to kick off a whole new universe for DC Comics on the big screen, and Warner Bros. is betting big, having spent around $225 million on the film. If things go well, this could be the start of a long run of superhero hits.

For that to happen, though, Superman needs to stick around and keep pulling people into theaters beyond the first few days. So far, the signs are good. It got an “A-” from audiences according to CinemaScore, and critics have also been saying mostly positive things.

This new version of Superman stars David Corenswet as Clark Kent, who also takes on Lex Luthor, played by Nicholas Hoult. Rachel Brosnahan plays Lois Lane, and the movie also brings in other DC heroes like Guy Gardner, Hawkgirl, Metamorpho, and Mister Terrific. Jimmy Olsen is there too, played by Skyler Gisondo.

Meanwhile, in second place at the box office is Jurassic World Rebirth, which earned another $11.3 million on Friday. That’s a 58% drop from last weekend and puts the film on track to make around $38.7 million this weekend. It opened on a Wednesday, right before the Fourth of July, so it had a five-day head start.

The movie just passed $200 million in North America and should reach $230 million by Sunday. But when compared to 2022’s Jurassic World Dominion, which made $250 million at this point, Rebirth is doing a bit less, still a big hit, just not quite as huge as before.

In third place is F1, the racing movie starring Brad Pitt and released by Warner Bros. and Apple Studios. It earned $3.7 million on Friday, down 47% from last week. So far, it has made about $126.9 million in North America. That’s pretty good, but with a reported budget of $250 million, plus heavy marketing costs, it’s still unclear if it’ll be profitable in theaters. Still, it’s Apple’s biggest push into movies so far, and international numbers are helping.

Fourth goes to How to Train Your Dragon, the live-action version, which brought in another $2.3 million Friday. It’s now at $239 million total and has officially made more money than the original animated film from 2010. It’s the most successful entry in the franchise now.

Rounding out the top five is Disney and Pixar’s Elio. It made $1.2 million on Friday and has a total of $60.9 million so far. Even though its weekend-to-weekend performance has been steady, it had a really slow start with just $20 million in its opening weekend, making it the lowest launch ever for a Pixar movie.

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