Lionsgate had a flop-filled year in 2024, and it would like to leave it in the rear-view mirror. Fortunately, the turnaround is already underway after a modestly successful winter, and now the studio is looking at a brighter 2025, which it laid out in full to movie theater owners at CinemaCon on Tuesday.
The presentation was filled with a flurry of announcements of production greenlights and first-look deals, as well as onstage interviews by Lionsgate’s film chairman Adam Fogelson with stars and directors of the studio’s upcoming attractions.
It was all capped off with Jenna Ortega, co-star of The Weeknd’s upcoming music concept film “Hurry Up Tomorrow,” introducing the cinema-loving pop star to an auditorium of thrilled exhibitors to perform a pair of songs, including his 2020 smash hit “Blinding Lights.”
Lionsgate is also going all in on as much “John Wick” as fans could ever want, announcing that, yes, the Baba Yaga’s death at the end of “John Wick: Chapter 4” didn’t take and that Keanu Reeves will be back for “Chapter 5.”
The studio is also hoping that fans are interested in more from that franchise than just Reeves’ deadly assassin. That’s why they are sending in “Ballerina,” a spinoff starring Ana De Armas, as their top summer tentpole.
But the film is also part of Lionsgate’s test of how much it can expand the “Wick” IP, as it has launched a new immersive attraction based on the movies in Las Vegas. And on the CinemaCon stage, they announced two more “Wick” films: an animated prequel that goes into the prime of John’s assassin career and a spinoff featuring Donnie Yen’s blind assassin Caine that builds off a post-credit scene from “Chapter 4.”
If “Ballerina” and these new projects can convince “Wick” fans to come back for a film set in the same world but with a different vengeful protagonist, expect Lionsgate to keep this decade-old franchise at the top of their tentpole list.
But Lionsgate doesn’t just have Reeves playing his most famous role this side of Neo in 2025. The “Bill & Ted” star is returning to his comedy roots with Aziz Ansari’s “Good Fortune,” a film in which he plays Gabriel, a bumbling, socially awkward guardian angel who switches a struggling man’s life with that of his wealthy employer to teach him that wealth won’t solve all of his problems.
Except it does solve all his problems, and Gabriel is punished for his backfired plan by being exiled from heaven and forced to live with the man’s former boss now stuck in squalor.
“Good Fortune” is one of several low-to-mid-budget productions and acquisitions that Lionsgate will look to deliver better box office consistency than last year, when the studio suffered a string of flops that included “The Crow,” “Megalopolis” and “Borderlands,” the latter of which being a $110 million co-production that bombed so badly that CEO Jon Feltheimer acknowledged in an earnings call that “everything that could go wrong, did go wrong” on that project.
Despite a year in which its domestic annual grosses sank to an anemic $251 million, insiders at Lionsgate told TheWrap in January that the studio still believed that its core business — lower budget genre films funded through foreign presales plus titles from production partners like Kingdom Story Company — remained sound.
That continued faith in the model was shown with films like the Stephen King adaptation of “The Long Walk,” which stars Cooper Hoffman and David Jonsson alongside Mark Hamill who, playing against type, plays the viciously cruel Major who oversees a contest in which a hundred teenage boys are forced to walk until only one is left standing while the others, who fall to exhaustion, are executed with a shot to the head.
Lionsgate also showed a better balance than its ultraviolent and bleak presentation last year, contrasting “The Long Walk” with “Power Ballad,” a light-hearted music-filled dramedy from “Sing Street” director John Carney starring Paul Rudd and Nick Jonas as a wedding singer and a pop star whose lives and wildly different careers become intertwined when the pop star uses a privately written song by the singer to revive his flailing career.
And at the end of the year, Lionsgate will release an adaptation of BookTok sensation “The Housemaid” from director Paul Feig starring the rapidly rising Sydney Sweeney alongside Amanda Seyfried and Brandon Sklenar. Feig’s brand of thrillers will now be a mainstay of the Lionsgate slate as the director signed a first look deal this week.
But one notable absence from the presentation was “Michael,” Antonie Fuqua’s upcoming biopic of Michael Jackson that got a teaser trailer at the end of Lionsgate’s presentation last year.
While Lionsgate is only handling North American and U.K. distribution for the film — Universal will distribute in the rest of the world — it could join the “Hunger Games” series on top of Lionsgate’s all-time charts if fans of the King of Pop turn out in droves.
That would be spectacular news for theaters, especially considering that “Michael” is currently slated for an early October release. A major reason why the box office has struggled so much since the pandemic — including during this woeful first quarter of 2025 — has been a lack of consistent hit films outside of the prime summer and holiday moviegoing periods.
A lot of exhibitors will find their financial strain eased if they don’t have to anxiously count down the autumn weeks for a Thanksgiving release like “Wicked” or “Moana 2” to bail them out, and “Michael” could help bring some stability.
But considering that Lionsgate had trailers ready for the rest of its Q4 films like “Now You See Me 3” and “The Housemaid,” it is possible that “Michael” may face a release date delay. Lionsgate said during the presentation that it will have more announcements regarding the film in the coming weeks.
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