Captain America Soars to the Top, Box Office Takes Flight | Weekend of February 14th, 2025

A terrific weekend at the box office, with Captain America: Brave New World exceeding expectations! It's the highest-grossing weekend of 2025 so far, and the best we've seen since Thanksgiving—a fantastic start to the year.

‍Paddington in Peru also had a strong opening, landing comfortably in second place. Both films performed slightly better than predicted, especially considering most projections were based on the 4-day holiday weekend, and we're looking at the 3-day numbers. For example, Captain America was projected to hit $90M for the 4 days, but it actually brought in $100M. This is a definitive win for the box office.

It's not surprising to see family-friendly titles dominating the charts after Captain America (though one could argue it's a family film too, despite the PG-13 rating). Captain America snagged 56% of total admissions, but family fare took another 20% (counting Paddington, Dog Man, and Mufasa). With the holiday weekend and winter break in many parts of the country, kid-targeted movies tend to do well.

There was some shuffling in the rankings when comparing admissions to box office dollars, with only the top two titles staying consistent. Dog Man and Heart Eyes were neck and neck in dollars, but Dog Man translated those dollars into more admissions thanks to lower ticket prices.

One cool thing to note is Ne Zha 2, an animated Mandarin Chinese fantasy film. It brought in a solid $7.2M and hundreds of thousands of admissions, surpassing Inside Out 2 as the highest-grossing animated movie. It's raked in over $1.7B globally, mostly from mainland China. Ne Zha 1 opened back in 2019 and made about $725M globally. That one opened in July, while this one opened for Chinese New Year in mainland China and was apparently unstoppable.

Not much is coming out in wide release this weekend, though there are a few limited releases. Captain America should hold onto #1, and we expect Paddington in Peru to have strong legs too, with the holiday week wrapping up for many.

How many tickets will be sold this coming weekend? Find out on our next Cinema Ranker and follow us on LinkedIn to stay up to date with the cinema industry.

To learn more about The People Platform's Audience Measurement, click here.