October 2025 U.S. box office weakest in three decades outside 2020

Domestic box office for October 2025 is on track to total roughly $425 million, marking the weakest October in nearly three decades outside the pandemic year of 2020, industry tracker Comscore said, as a sluggish Halloween weekend left theaters with one of the lowest monthly tallies since 1997. The weekend itself produced only about $53 million to $54 million in North America, with holdovers rather than new wide releases occupying the top of the chart.

Estimates from Comscore put the weekend winner as the Colleen Hoover adaptation Regretting You with about $8.1 million in its second weekend, narrowly ahead of Universal and Blumhouse’s Black Phone 2 at roughly $8.0 million in its third weekend. Other notable results included Sony/Crunchyroll’s Chainsaw Man at about $6 million, Focus Features’ wide expansion Bugonia at roughly $4.8 million, and a Back to the Future 40th anniversary reissue near $4.7 million. Several rereleases, including Netflix’s KPop Demon Hunters, also contributed to the subdued totals.

Analysts point to a combination of factors that produced October’s decline. Comscore’s head of marketplace trends, Paul Dergarabedian, said studios and theaters were contending...