Towards the end of last year, as my most stalwart of followers certainly remember, I wrote a column about all of the movies that had come out in 2024 that I hadn’t gotten around to seeing yet. To no one’s surprise, I still haven’t gotten to see most of them. There are just so many things to watch, so many movies and shows that are pulling at my attention, and I’ve got a kid running around that not only limits what I can watch while he’s awake and paying attention, but also means that there are a LOT of sports on TV in our house. Not to mention the fact that I’ve been doing my “Year of Superman” thing since January, so a not-inconsiderable amount of my viewing time has been devoted to that in one way or another.

2025 has not been different from 2024: there are dozens of movies that hit the box office (or streaming services) this year that I sincerely intend to watch, but simply haven’t gotten around to yet. Before I delve into those, though, let’s do a quick list of those movies I DID watch from last year’s list and, ultimately, what I thought of them:

• Venom: The Last Dance-Not bad, but probably the least impressive of the trilogy.
• Deadpool and Wolverine-Funny and full of the kind of delicious meta-commentary that only Deadpool can make work. 
• Red One-Cute, unremarkable, but not deserving of some of the hate it gets on the internet.
• Despicable Me 4-Better than 3, but I still probably wouldn’t bother with these movies if my son didn’t like them.
• Flow-Technologically and visually, a masterpiece, although I thought the story was weak.
• Sonic the Hedgehog 3-Make it make sense that this series keeps being entertaining.
• MoviePass, MovieCrash-Intriguing look at how a system that was always doomed to failure wound up failing.
• Music By John Williams-Nothing particularly revelatory in this documentary, but still a lovely watch.
• Godzilla/Kong: The New Empire-Much as I love giant monster movies, this one felt like more of the same.
• Beetlejuice! Beetlejuice!-Not as good as the original, but as far as legacy sequels go, it’s a pretty good one.
• A Quiet Place Day One-Probably the most character-driven film in this series so far, and that’s a plus.
• The Substance-Incredible and absolutely worth every bit of praise it’s gotten.
• The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare-Made me want to read the book, which you can imagine, is high praise.
• Alien: Romulus-If you’re going to keep making Alien movies you gotta find something new to do with them. I haven’t watched the new Hulu series, but I suspect that it was better than this film.
• The 4:30 Movie-Tender, sweet, without being saccharine. When Kevin Smith really speaks from the heart, there are few that do it better.
• Madame Web-The internet told me this was the worst movie ever made. They were wrong. It’s really more bland and generic than actively bad. 
• Joker: Folie a Deux-This was a thing that happened.

You know, looking back, I actually got around to more of last year’s list than I would have expected, which is a nice feeling. Of course, while I was busy watching the movies that came out LAST year, movies from THIS year just started piling up on me. Most of the reasons I don’t go to the movies as much as I used to haven’t changed: price, time, availability, and so forth. One thing, however, HAS changed. My son is eight years old now, and he’s gotten better about making it through a movie, especially a movie he’s excited about. This year my wife and I managed to take him to both Superman (naturally) and Fantastic Four: First Steps, in addition to the usual assortment of kids’ animated movies. 

One such movie we did NOT get around to, though, was The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie. Much as I wanted to support it in theaters, time was not on my side, and it’s still on my list of end-of-year films I haven’t gotten to yet. As is Pixar’s newest, Elio, a movie that seemed to come and go with no notice whatsoever. But I’ve heard from a few people who actually saw it that they liked it, and I’m hoping I can get Eddie to join me for a viewing before the year runs out. He’s also excited about Zootopia 2, so we may make a movie date out of that one. I would also like to show him director Steve Hudson’s Stitch Head, which looks to be kind of a kids’ take on Frankenstein. And although it doesn’t really seem like my kind of movie, everybody on the planet except for me seems to have gone wild over K-Pop Demon Hunters on Netflix, and I feel almost obligated to watch it out of curiosity, if nothing else. 

This year also brought – as years tend to do – a bunch of sequels. And if it’s a sequel to a movie I actually like, I’ll watch it. But I’m also the kind of nerd who prefers to re-watch the previous film (or films) in a series BEFORE watching the sequel, especially if it’s been a long time. So that, in addition to the usual problems of availability and time, are the reason I have yet to get to the “requel” of I Know What You Did Last Summer or the more direct sequels like 28 Years Later, Black Phone 2, Nobody 2, the Disney hit Freakier Friday, or the Disney flop Tron: Ares. A brief note about Tron: I love the original and I greatly enjoyed Tron: Legacy. I know Ares crashed and burned at the box office, but this has absolutely no impact on my desire to watch it. I don’t despise Jared Leto just because the Internet tells me to and, once this movie lands on Disney+, I fully intend to watch and evaluate it on its own merits. And you can’t stop me. Nyeah. 

There’s also Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Movie, which hasn’t dropped on Netflix yet, but is on my list. The first Knives Out was absolutely astounding, one of the best mysteries I’ve seen in ages (and perhaps THE best mystery/comedy I’ve ever seen). Glass Onion, the second Benoit Blanc mystery, still entertained me, but I didn’t quite find it up to the level of the original. I’m hoping that Rian Johnson and Daniel Craig bounce back with this third installment. 

Netflix, as a studio, has absolutely loaded me with mystery movies this year that I just haven’t gotten to yet. In addition to Wake Up Dead Man, I’ve also got my eye on The Woman in Cabin 10. This one stars Keira Knightley as a journalist who sees a passenger go overboard on a cruise ship, then gets caught up in the question of what’s going on. Chris Columbus directed The Thursday Murder Club, a crime comedy about a group of senior mystery enthusiasts who get swept into a real life murder. The cast is incredible – Helen Mirren, Pierce Brosnan, Ben Kingsley, Celia Imrie, David Tennant, Naomi Ackie – why the hell haven’t I watched this yet?

I can tell you exactly why I haven’t watched Netflix’s Frankenstein yet: because they dropped it in NOVEMBER. What a dumb move. I couldn’t be more excited to watch Guillermo del Toro’s take on my favorite monster of all time, but I’ve had my hands full the last few weeks. Why on Earth wouldn’t they put this out in October and play up the Halloween angle? Granted, they’re the ones running a billion-dollar streaming service and I’m the guy writing blogs about it for free, but I think we can all agree that I am far wiser than they are.

Speaking of horror, Frankenstein isn’t the only movie that slipped past me this year. Good Boy, the horror film told from the point of view of a loyal dog, has been on my radar for a few years now, ever since I heard the premise. It’s gotten rave reviews, and with a runtime of only 73 minutes, I’ll be kind of mad with myself if I don’t sneak it in before the end of the year. Similarly, I’m interested in the slasher throwback Marshmallow, the Shudder film Night of the Reaper, and the survival horror video game adaptation Until Dawn. 

And the documentaries! I haven’t even GOTTEN to the documentaries yet! Prime Video has given us John Candy: I Like Me, a movie that seems to have left everybody who has watched it so far in tears. I’m probably going to wait until school lets out for Thanksgiving and then do a double feature of this one with the movie that gave us the title quote, the brilliant Planes, Trains, and Automobiles. 

I’ve got no such excuse, though, for sleeping on Jaws at 50, a documentary about one of the greatest movies ever made, or George A. Romero’s Resident Evil, which is a documentary about a movie that was NEVER made. That’s a relatively small subgenre of entertainment documentaries, but it’s one I’ve always enjoyed. Prime Video has also given us When We Went MAD!, a documentary about the history of the magazine that we all thought was hilarious when we were nine years old. I’ll be honest, I fell out of love with Mad Magazine ages ago (and re-reading some of their stories this summer during my Year of Superman did not reignite the love affair), but a documentary about comics is always going to get a view from me.

Speaking of comics, I did a lot better this year at watching the superhero movies that came out…well, either that or there just weren’t as many of them. But looking at my list of movies that I missed this year, there are only three superhero movies I didn’t get around too, two of which are animated Batman movies. Batman Ninja Vs. Yakuza League and Aztec Batman: Clash of Empires are both “Elseworlds”-style takes on the character, plucking him out of Gotham City and putting him into feudal Japan and the time of the Spanish conquistadors, respectively. The concept of Batman, in and of itself, is flexible enough that these things are usually at least interesting. Then there’s the long-awaited remake of The Toxic Avenger, which has finally been taken off the shelf and released after two or three years of languishing. I’m very curious to see if the legendarily cheesy Troma Studios hero will hold up to a larger budget.

As for low budgets, there are several indie movies that got my attention this year, movies I read about online or heard discussed in podcasts, that I haven’t watched. Jonathan L. Bowen’s The Comic Shop, for example, or the British comedy Bad Apples about a teacher who accidentally abducts her worst student and then finds that suddenly her class is more manageable. Dropout comedian Isabella Roland wrote and starred in the comedy D(e)AD, about a woman whose family is haunted by her father’s ghost – everyone except for her. There’s also Hamnet, a drama about the tragedy BEHIND William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and John-Michael Powell’s crime drama Violent Ends. I can’t tell you too much about any of these because I don’t KNOW much, except that I heard enough about them to have my curiosity piqued and put them on my watchlist. 

Finally, in case you didn’t know, I’m kind of a fan of Stephen King. And this year has been awash in King content, with the new It TV prequel Welcome to Derry now running on HBO Max and no less than FOUR big-screen adaptations of his work, of which I have seen exactly one. The Monkey. Which I liked, but which was VERY different from the short story it’s based on. That means I still need to get to The Life of Chuck, based on a novella that I thought was pretty good, but the film is directed by Mike Flanagan, which means it’s probably brilliant. Francis Lawrence directed The Long Walk, an adaptation of one of King’s bleakest stories (originally published under his Richard Bachman pseudonym), and I look forward to seeing Mark Hamill playing the bad guy again – because despite most people thinking of him as Luke Skywalker, real ones know he’s actually the best Joker. And lest I forget Edgar Wright directed a remake of another Bachman book, The Running Man, a sci-fi action film rather than horror, but with trailers that look like an awful lot of fun.

The point is, I DO NOT HAVE ENOUGH TIME TO WATCH ALL OF THE MOVIES.

As always, I’m going to do my best to get through as many of these (and the two dozen or so other movies that are on my list that I didn’t mention) between now and the time my Christmas vacation ends in early January, but who knows how many I’ll actually get to? In the meantime, if there are any particularly good movies that came out this year that I didn’t mention that you think I haven’t seen yet, let me know. What’s adding a few more films to a list I’m never going to reach the end of anyway?

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can subscribe to his newsletter by clicking right here. He’s also started putting his LitReel videos on TikTok. He needs to go to the opposite of that planet from Interstellar, some place where he can be there for five minutes and have time to watch 12 month’s worth of movies. He hears Detroit feels like that sometimes.