Meet the Movies of 2025: First Looks With Witherspoon, Pattinson, Hathaway, Gladstone, M3GAN, and More (2024)

1. Frankenstein

Netflix

Guillermo del Toro has spent a lifetime imagining his own adaptation of Mary Shelley’s tale of a doctor (played by Oscar Isaac) who tampers with the natural order by turning dead tissue into a new being (Jacob Elordi). Much of the film, including this laboratory scene, takes place within the remnants of once-great structures. “Gothic romance was born partially out of the fascination with ruins,” del Toro tells VF. “Sometimes they’re more beautiful than the building complete because it’s the clash of creation and destruction.”

2. Mother Mary

A24

To become the pop star Mother Mary, Anne Hathaway had to push past self-doubt. “I hadn’t been a student like this in a really long time,” says the Oscar winner, who stars with Michaela Coel. “I had knowledge of myself: I can’t do this. I can’t dance. I can’t sing like a pop star.” With the help of director David Lowery and the crew, however? “They made it so that I could.”

3. Love Hurts

Universal Pictures

Ke Huy Quan, an Oscar winner for Everything Everywhere All at Once, lands his first major leading-man role in this original action comedy, playing a mild-mannered real estate agent who can’t escape his past. Expect the film, which also stars Ariana DeBose, to showcase Quan’s stunt experience while throwing some surprises the audience’s way. “The things I do for love!” he says.

4. M3gan 2.0

Universal pictures

Have you tried unplugging her and plugging her back in again? Something tells us that won’t fix the fatal design glitches in the killer girl robot whose smooth dance moves and expressionless face slayed at the box office the first time around. Here, actor Violet McGraw (returning as M3GAN’s human fixation) beholds the prop bot alongside the film’s lead puppeteer, Adrien Morot.

5. Mickey 17

Warner Bros.

Bong Joon Ho’s long-awaited follow-up to Parasite tracks Robert Pattinson’s Mickey, an “expendable” whose body is reprinted each time he dies. Also starring Naomi Ackie, Steven Yeun, Toni Collette, Mark Ruffalo, and Anamaria Vartolomei, this off-kilter sci-fi flick proves the more Pattinsons, the merrier.

6. Him

Universal Pictures

Psychological horror hits the football field in the latest from producer Jordan Peele. Him, which director Justin Tipping describes as a sports movie “translated through a classic spaghetti Western lens,” follows a young player (Tyriq Withers) taken under the wing of a legendary QB, played by Marlon Wayans.

7. Jurassic World Rebirth

Universal Pictures

Scarlett Johansson and Bechir Sylvain wade through a field while filming in Thailand with director Gareth Edwards (Rogue One). In the seventh movie of the franchise, they’re members of a team harvesting genetic material from wild dinosaurs that contains lifesaving compounds. The other parts of the dinos are as deadly as ever.

8. The Ballad of a Small Player

Netflix

Hot off the multi-Oscar-winning All Quiet on the Western Front and the recent papal drama Conclave, director Edward Berger adapts Lawrence Osborne’s 2014 novel for a thriller about a British high-stakes gambler, played by Colin Farrell, who is lying low in Macau when he encounters a mysterious figure (Tilda Swinton).

9. Materialists

A24

Celine Song’s Past Lives came out of nowhere at last year’s Sundance and went on to nab Oscar nominations for best picture and original screenplay. The writer-director’s second film also features a love triangle—this time involving a matchmaker, her perfect match, and an ex-boyfriend—but with A-listers Dakota Johnson, Chris Evans, and Pedro Pascal, it won’t be flying under the radar.

10. The Wedding Banquet

Bleecker Street

For Lily Gladstone, Andrew Ahn’s The Wedding Banquet felt like coming home—specifically to comedy. After she earned an Oscar nod last year for her devastating turn in Killers of the Flower Moon, improvising with the starry ensemble of this fresh take on Ang Lee’s 1993 rom-com allowed her to get blessedly silly. “I told Andrew, you’ve got to call ‘cut’ on me after 30 seconds,” she says, “or I’m going to get weird.”

11. You’re Cordially Invited

Prime Video

Dearly beloved, we gather here today for a comedy starring Reese Witherspoon and Will Ferrell as strangers who end up reluctantly sharing a tiny wedding venue for their family members’ weddings. The result (which you’re already beginning to imagine, thanks to the famously spirited cast) is a series of increasingly over-the-top high jinks and a visit from an angry alligator.

12. The Amateur

20th Century Studios

A new adaptation of author Robert Littell’s thriller from 1981, the movie stars Bohemian Rhapsody Oscar winner Rami Malek as a CIA cryptographer who seeks revenge after his wife is killed in a London terrorist attack.

13. The Gorge

Apple TV+

In this action thriller from Doctor Strange filmmaker Scott Derrickson, Miles Teller and Anya Taylor-Joy play operatives standing watch on an immense wall that confines malevolent forces to their lair. It all goes haywire, of course, leading to a desperate fight. “For one set piece, we had a WWII Willys Jeep pulled up the side of a rock wall while under attack. Miles and Anya did most of their own stunts while attached to safety wires,” Derrickson says of this shot.

This story has been updated.

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