Marshall's 2(025) Most Wanted
And, for paid subscribers, the most anticipated press tours
Welcome to 2025! Though we’ll still be stuck talking about 2024 movies for quite some time (case in point: the Golden Globes are this Sunday), that doesn’t mean we can’t start looking ahead toward the achievements that will mark this new year.
NOTE: I’m still holding space for Hedda, Mickey 17, Mother Mary, Polaris, The Way of the Wind, and Wizards! — all of which I’ve mentioned in previous iterations of this list. But I wanted to shine a light on more titles that should get us all excited about the upcoming year in cinema!
MARSHALL’S 25 MOST ANTICIPATED OF 2025
(CLICK ANY TITLE AND GO TO THE IMDb PAGE TO LEARN MORE)
After the Hunt: Luca Guadagnino is on what could be an all-time heater right now coming off Queer, Challengers, and Bones & All. Now, he’s enlisted Andrew Garfield, Julia Roberts, Chloë Sevigny, Michael Stuhlbarg, and Ayo Edebiri for his academia-set drama. I’m so in.
Avatar: Fire and Ash (December 19): All hail Big Jim! I will be sat for the holidays, especially because this is the one where we can expect more Kate Winslet.
Blue Moon: A Richard Linklater movie about the opening night of Oklahoma!?! I’m seated. The theater employees are scared and asking me to leave because it’s ‘not dated for release yet’ but I’m simply too seated.
The Bride (September 26): My regards to Guillermo del Toro, who certainly knows how to make a monster movie, my most anticipated Frankenstein tale of 2025 is the one from Maggie Gyllenhaal making her follow-up to the exquisite The Lost Daughter.
Bugonia (November 7): Emma Stone probably shaved her head for this latest collaboration with Yorgos Lanthimos?! We’re reaching De Niro-Scorsese levels of physical commitment in this partnership.
Die My Love: I think only one director could possibly contain the chaos of a combined Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson marriage on screen. And that person is the equally chaotic Lynne Ramsay. My gosh, inject this one into my veins.
© Black Label Media Eddington: No Ari Aster movie has fully clicked for me, but I’m glad A24 is giving him seemingly free reign for some gonzo cinematic visions. Eddington could be arriving right on time with its yarn of a small-town New Mexico sheriff (Joaquin Phoenix)
The Entertainment System Is Down: “In my next movie, everybody will die, actually,” Ruben Östlund told me back in 2022. “The airplane will crash, and everybody will die. You will get to know it already from the beginning, flight number da-da-da, and then we see these passengers dealing with the triviality of like, ‘I have no entertainment on my screen!’” The dual Palme d’Or-winning director is never shy about giving away the endings of his movies, but I’m still curious to see everything leading up to it.
Father, Mother, Sister, Brother: As someone who vastly prefers human dramas by Jim Jarmusch to his off-kilter genre work, I’m glad he’ll follow up the dismal The Dead Don’t Die with a story of estranged adult siblings. It’s allegedly a triptych, so who knows what the various configurations will be … but any permutation of Cate Blanchett, Adam Driver, Vicky Krieps, Charlotte Rampling, and Tom Waits is one that has my attention.
Final Destination: Bloodlines (May 16): Final Destination has stealthily been one of our great enduring franchises, and it feels only fitting we will get its (hopefully!) triumphant return in 2025. With death the only certainty in life, it’s just a matter of how much fun we can have along the way to inevitable demise.
F1 (June 25, trailer): The price tag on this Apple-backed racing movie is rumored to be approaching $300 million. I can’t wait to see that much money on screen, regardless of quality.
Hamnet: Post-Eternals redemption tour for Chloé Zhao incoming with a handsome costume drama featuring a match made in Irish heaven: Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal. Joe Alwyn will also be there.
Highest 2 Lowest: Spike Lee, at the vanguard of the second Film School Generation, is one of our most cinematically literate directors. I can’t wait to see what he’ll do with his reinterpretation of Akira Kurosawa’s fantastic High and Low.
The History of Sound: Internet boyfriend apocalypse incoming with Josh O’Connor and Paul Mescal as yearning lovers in a period drama.
Honey Don’t!: Ethan Coen’s solo directorial debut in Drive-Away Dolls was definitely among my most disappointing movie experiences of 2024, but I’ll give him another chance to do the campy lesbian road trip movie again. I’m just hoping Margaret Qualley doesn’t do whatever she was doing with her accent again.
Materialists: Celine Song is making her follow-up to Past Lives about a matchmaker’s craft gone wrong … are we about to get art-house Hitch? (To be clear, this would be a welcome development for me.)
Marty Supreme (December 25): I’m invested enough in the whole Timothée Chalamet project that I’ve got to be hyped to see him finally getting to fulfill his dream of working with the great, grimy New York director of our time in Josh Safdie.
M3GAN 2.0 (June 27): Have a little fun, everyone. M3GAN was a true camp classic, and I can’t wait for a second helping.
Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning (May 25, trailer): I doubt this is really the end of the line for Tom Cruise in his longest-running franchise, but I eagerly anticipate how he’ll pull out all the stops here. (I’m not-so-secretly hoping he finds a way to hand the reins to Glen Powell.)
One Battle After Another/The Battle of Baktan Cross (August 8): Whatever Paul Thomas Anderson wants to call his return to making contemporary-set stories (with Leonardo DiCaprio and a nine-figure budget, to boot), I’m there with bells on.
The Phoenician Scheme: Here’s to Scarlett Johansson and Tom Hanks becoming regulars in Wes Anderson movies following standout appearances in Asteroid City. It’s been rumored this will be a new gear for Anderson as a father-daughter movie, but I’m eager to see whatever he's cooking up regardless.
Sacrifice: I was excited about whatever Romain Gavras wanted to cook up after the incredible Athena. But my goodness, I didn’t even know until I went to the IMDb page that he co-wrote the script with Will Arbery, one of the most exciting new playwrights (and from a similar Texan milieu to me), about a radical group crashing a charity event. And Charli XCX is involved?!
Splitsville: It still feels like we’re awaiting the great open relationship comedy, and the guys who gave us The Climb (with Dakota Johnson and Nicholas Braun on board) feel like a good bet to give it to us.
Wake Up Dead Man: As the rare person who seemed to like Glass Onion more than the original Knives Out, count me in for whatever Rian Johnson is cooking up here in this seemingly England-set whodunit.
The Young Mothers’ Home: While I haven’t been quite as high on the Dardenne Brothers’ turn toward more openly polemical dramas in the last decade, I can’t deny their righteous anger at the inhumanity spreading across Europe in the wake of vast migration. I’m sure they’ll break me with this story of five young mothers in a shelter trying to provide a better life for their children.
And now, for the paid Marshall and the Movies subscribers — a fun glimpse at what I think will have us talking from that supplemental cinematic experience of press tours.
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