A few months ago, I listed the top five most anticipated summer blockbusters of 2025. Now that I’ve seen them all, I have to be honest, none of them lived up to the hype. Here’s how it went:
Thunderbolts
Not great, not awful, just… there. Thunderbolts surprised me by being more fun than expected, but not by much. As someone who hasn’t kept up with the MCU’s endless stream of Disney+ shows, I was completely lost through half the plot. Characters popped in with zero context, and major moments landed with a shrug because I had no emotional investment. That said, there were a few saving graces: Julia Louis-Dreyfus is, as always, magnetic on screen every line she delivers has a snap to it.
Florence Pugh and David Harbour also brought a fun energy to their roles, injecting humor that occasionally worked. But when all is said and done, this is just another assembly-line superhero flick with a gray color palette, a forgettable villain, and yet another skybeam. It moves fast, which helps, and it’s certainly not the worst Marvel movie out there. But it’s also not special, bold, or emotionally resonant in any way.
Fantastic Four
There’s a quiet tragedy in watching a movie with so much talent fall flat. That’s Fantastic Four in a nutshell. I really like this cast, Pedro Pascal, Vanessa Kirby, Joseph Quinn, and Ebon Moss-Bachrach, but aside from Julia Garner’s mesmerizing Silver Surfer, the rest of the film felt undercooked and uninspired. The much-hyped retro-futuristic 1960s design aesthetic did nothing for me. The costumes were silly, the sets felt artificial, and the production design was more style than substance. I didn’t hate it, but I was bored. That’s almost worse. You can feel the studio’s fingerprints all over this project.
Another Marvel movie that was made by committee rather than vision. Galactus shows up and looks kind of cool, but even that feels like a footnote. Julia Garner’s performance, though, deserves better than the movie around her. She was mysterious, intense, and effortlessly compelling. I wish the whole film had followed her. Instead, we get another lifeless reboot of characters we’ve seen rebooted too many times. Marvel needed a win here, but this did not work for me.
Superman (2025)
I walked into Superman (2025) with low expectations, and somehow it still managed to underwhelm. It’s cheesy, formulaic, and drenched in the kind of false sincerity that makes it feel more like a parody than a reboot. David Corenswet is fine as Superman/Clark Kent. He looks the part and delivers his lines with the right amount of sincerity. Rachel Brosnahan brings some sharpness to Lois Lane, which was refreshing. Nicholas Hoult as Lex Luthor? A complete waste. He’s just a generic villain with no depth.
The writing is painfully weak. Jokes fall flat, emotional beats are rushed, and the whole thing plays like a sad attempt to please everyone and excite no one. I know James Gunn has his fans, but I’m not one of them. Aside from Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 1, his brand of humor and sentimentality never really works for me, and here, it just made me cringe. This was supposed to be the movie that “restored hope” to the DC Universe. Instead, it’s just another generic superhero entry, indistinguishable from the rest.
Mission: Impossible – Reckoning Part Two
At this point, I think the real mission is keeping this franchise fresh, and this movie fails that mission spectacularly. Reckoning Part Two is bloated, repetitive, and almost comically self-important. The first hour is completely unnecessary and should have been left on the cutting room floor. It’s just set up with no payoff, scenes dragged out to pad runtime, and exposition dumped like sandbags. Once things finally start “happening,” they’re as predictable as ever.
The plot is a convoluted mess of double-crosses and high-tech MacGuffins, stitched together by moments designed to show off Tom Cruise’s stunt addiction. Yes, the stunts are impressive, but who cares when the story is this thin? There’s no emotional core, no real stakes, just two and a half hours of noise. I used to have fun with this series, especially around Ghost Protocol, but now it feels like a parody of itself. The franchise has officially crossed into Fast & Furious territory, where physics, logic, and story are all secondary to spectacle. Sadly, I don’t think this will be the last one, but I really, really wish it were.
Jurassic World: New Dawn
Where do I even start? Jurassic World: New Dawn is a disaster not in the fun, dino-rampage way, but in the “how did this get made?” kind of way. It’s incoherent, emotionally hollow, and filled with characters who make decisions so baffling you’ll think the dinosaurs are the smart ones. The story makes zero sense. There’s no tension, no excitement, just a lot of running, screaming, and CGI. I didn’t care about a single character. Definitely not the kids (there are always kids). This franchise has become a copy of a copy of a copy, each installment more lifeless than the last.
I didn’t even care about the original Jurassic Park that much, but at least that had some fun moments and Spielberg-level craftsmanship. This one just has loud noises and exposition shouted over background chaos. It’s corporate filmmaking at its most soulless, a movie made because the last one made money, not because anyone had a story to tell. I don’t want to see another dinosaur movie again for the rest of my life, but unfortunately, we all know that another one is probably already in development.
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