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Animation Fuels IMAX To Its Best Year Ever: $1.28 Billion Worldwide Box Office
IMAX had its biggest-ever year in 2025, sparked by huge turnouts for animated and VFX-heavy spectacles from around the world. The exhibitor closed out 2025 with $1.28 billion in ticket sales worldwide.
The year’s top five titles on the big, big screen were:
- Ne Zha 2 (Enlight) — $166.7 million
- Avatar: Fire and Ash (Disney/20th Century Studios) — $112 million
- F1: The Movie (Apple Films) — $97.6 million
- Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle (Toho) — $95.9 million
- Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning (Paramount) – $75.8 million
That Global IMAX box office figure was up 40% from 2024, and 13% above the company’s previous pre-COVID high-water mark in 2019. In 2025, the company marked record-setting performances in 35 countries and territories and achieved its largest global market share ever, accounting for 3.8% of the worldwide box office from just over 1,800 screens.
Two of the year’s top IMAX performers were animated features, neither coming from Hollywood. China’s Ne Zha 2 led all titles with $166.7 million in IMAX box office, unsurprising given that the film posted the largest-ever overall box office for an animated film, making an eye-watering $2.2 billion globally.
Japan’s Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle, which pulled in $95.9 million from IMAX screens, helped drive record results in Japan and across Southeast Asia.
While Zootopia 2 didn’t make IMAX’s top five for 2025, the company has previously praised the film for inspiring its largest-ever Thanksgiving frame, when the Disney film debuted with $32.1 million worldwide.
Avatar: Fire and Ash, despite only coming out in late December, earned $112 million from IMAX screens and will continue to climb in the new year. The film’s reliance on high-end VFX and virtual production makes it a perfect match for the splendor of the oversized IMAX screens.
As IMAX CEO Rich Gelfond put it in a press release, 2025 marked a “transformational year” for the company, driven by a wider variety of releases and a more globally diverse slate. For IMAX, animation is clearly foundational to its distribution ecosystem.