Hollywood Studio Profit Report: Warner Bros. Rises

It’s not all glamour in Hollywood. Yes, the global box office rose 12 percent in 2025 to $33.6 billion, but domestic revenue only edged up 1 percent to $8.7 billion, and the business remained well below pre-COVID pandemic levels. What’s more, the profit picture for the film divisions of legacy entertainment conglomerates last year wasn’t rosy across the board either.

Sony and the belle of the recent bidding ball, Warner Bros., posted profit growth for the calendar year 2025 before Paramount struck a deal to acquire it and the rest of Warner Bros. Discovery, while other Hollywood studio giants recorded profit declines. And Paramount, for its part, even reported a widened loss.

Netflix, meanwhile, wrapped up 2025 with more growth, as well as bullish commentary that its dropped bid for Warners wouldn’t derail its momentum ahead.

In its annual studio profit report, The Hollywood Reporter has compiled the key trends and factors affecting the bottom lines of Hollywood giants’ film units for the past year.

But keep in mind that financial disclosures for Hollywood studios remain limited and are not easily comparable. For instance, Sony’s pictures segment includes TV networks. Also, THR crunched figures for the calendar years 2025 compared to 2024, even though Disney and Sony have fiscal years that don’t align with the calendar year, and their executive teams manage their businesses with an eye on the fiscal year.

The studio profit report actually includes a back-of-the-napkin look at Disney as the company doesn’t report figures for its filmed entertainment operations. (THR instead compares its “content sales/licensing and other” financials, even though reporting details have recently changed further and its apples-and-oranges in some respects as far as comparisons with other studios.)

Also included is a look at Netflix, whose financials are also not directly comparable to those of the studio units of entertainment conglomerates. For example, most of Netflix’s revenue still comes from subscribers that Hollywood giants typically record outside their studio units, along with a growing contribution from advertising revenue, which is most pronounced in the TV networks divisions of Hollywood powerhouses.

With all that noted for context, here’s a closer look at the bottom line of the film businesses of Hollywood titans during the calendar year 2025.

Profit:  +47% year-over-year
Revenue: +9% year-over-year

The most profitable traditional Hollywood studio operation last year was once again Warner Bros.

The studio’s biggest box office hits of the year were A Minecraft Movie ($961 million), Superman ($619 million), with Oscar nominee Sinners ($369 million) also driving audiences and revenue. They all contributed to a 9 percent revenue gain. The bottom line, as expressed in adjusted operating income before depreciation and amortization (OIBDA), jumped 47 percent when rounded to the first decimal place, even though costs and expenses climbed 1 percent as the cost of revenue dropped 2 percent to $7.4 billion, but selling, general and administrative expenses jumped 10 percent to $2.7 billion. WBD also disclosed its operating income figures, recording a roughly 220 percent gain from $529 million to $1.7 billion.

Theatrical revenue in 2025 jumped 15 percent, driven by “higher film rental revenue and higher content licensing,” and TV content revenue rose 9 percent, boosted by “higher inter-segment content licensing, primarily due to the timing of renewals, partially offset by lower initial telecast revenue due to fewer deliveries.” However, gaming revenue dropped 32 percent, with the conglomerate citing “lower carryover [from 2024] and fewer releases in 2025.”

WBD CEO David Zaslav touted “a historic run of success” in 2025 on a recent earnings conference call. “Seven consecutive films opened with more than $40 million in box office sales, a first for any studio. And our films spent 16 total weeks atop the global box office. We accomplished this through brilliant original films, with nine films debuting number one at the box office in 2025.” He also lauded One Battle After Another and added that “we revived IP like The Conjuring: Last Rites and Final Destination: Bloodlines.”

Meanwhile, gaming had a retool year in 2025. “We allowed ourselves to get distracted going after too many IPs, and we really went back to the basics,” WBD CEO and president of global streaming and games JB Perrette explained on the earnings call. “And the core of last year’s reset was around getting back to proven studios with proven games and proven players.”

All in all, studios segment financials rebounded, as forecast by management. But Zaslav previously highlighted that the business had in the past made a profit of $3 billion a year. “We’ve got to get that back to $3 billion and growing,” he had said.

Not that the results got much attention. After all, most focus was on news from the WBD board later in the earnings day that David Ellison’s Paramount Skydance’s best and final takeover offer for the company was superior to Netflix, leading the streamer to bow out of the bidding.

Expect all eyes and ears going forward to be on any additional signs and body language on Ellison’s strategy for bringing Warners and Paramount under the same roof. During a March 2 conference call, he highlighted: “Franchises and big pieces of intellectual property are launched in theaters, period. We really believe that movies should be seen in theaters, and we still believe it’s … one of the most significant places that you can really create long-term resident intellectual property.”

Profit: -22% year-over-year
Revenue: +2% year-over-year

Comcast’s NBCUniversal entertainment unit, ahead of its separation of the Versant cable networks operations, reported 2025 studios unit revenue rose 2 percent to $11.3 billion despite a 4.3 percent decline in theatrical revenue to $1.6 billion, because the likes of Despicable Me 4, Wicked, and Kung Fu Panda 4 in 2024 did better than last year’s Jurassic World Rebirth, How to Train Your Dragon and Wicked: For Good. The drop was outweighed by a 1.7 percent content licensing gain to $8.2 billion and a 9.7 percent jump on “other” revenue, which includes “the sale of physical and digital home entertainment products, as well as the production and licensing of live stage plays and the distribution of content produced by third parties.”

However, NBCU’s studios unit profit dropped 22 percent to $1.1 billion last year due to a 5.2 percent increase in costs and expenses, driven by a 19.5 percent jump in marketing and promotion spending due to a higher number of releases, while programming and production spending climbed only 2.5 percent.

Universal’s top movie of 2025 was Jurassic World: Rebirth, which brought in $869 million, followed by How to Train Your Dragon ($636 million) and Wicked: For Good ($526 million).

Comcast co-CEO Mike Cavanagh was bullish about the studios unit’s 2026 outlook earlier this year, saying: “Our Studios slate remains exceptional, led by The Odyssey from Christopher Nolan, The Super Mario Galaxy movie, and Minions 3 from Chris Meledandri, and Disclosure Day from Steven Spielberg.”

Profit: +23% year-over-year
Revenue: -3% year-over-year

No Bad Boys: Ride or Die (whose 2024 global box office hit more than $400 million), no It Ends With Us ($350 million-plus), and no Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire ($200 million-plus)? No problem for Sony. At least that is the story that its Pictures unit financials for the calendar year 2025 tells.

Anime film Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle ($134 million in 2025), which became the top-grossing anime movie of all time globally, horror thriller 28 Years Later ($70 million) and Apple TV hit drama Pluribus were among the standouts for Sony in calendar year 2025. The studio also had successes with local productions, such as Germany’s The Three Investigators – Carpathian Dog, Spain’s Padre no hay mas que uno 5 and Japan’s 366 Days. 

But overall, Sony’s slate in 2025 amounted to $1.5 billion, down from the $2.4 billion theatrical haul it had recorded in 2024. Helping out was anime streamer Crunchyroll’s subscriber growth, a key financial benefit last year.

Sony management sounded bullish on the path ahead during a recent earnings conference call. “Crunchyroll continues to work to enhance the 360 degree IP experience of anime fans through the theatrical distribution of Demon Slayer, the launch of the Crunchyroll Manga service and other efforts,” the company highlighted. “We intend to enhance our efforts to increase the revenue of our studio business.”

Profit: -$232M loss, widened from -$96M
Revenue: -4% year-over-year

David Ellison’s Skydance Media only closed its acquisition of Paramount in early August, so it is still early days for the studio’s transformation. In fact, Paramount’s Filmed Entertainment unit continued to write red ink, with its loss widening in 2025 amid a 4 percent revenue drop and a 16 percent expense increase to $3.6 billion. 

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, with a global box office of $599 million last year, was the studio’s biggest release, while The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants racked up $167 million following its release in the late stages of 2025.

In a letter to shareholders, Paramount highlighted its film losses as “an area we are actively addressing as we work to rebuild our film slate for profitable growth in 2026, 2027, and beyond.”

Ellison vowed: “We are going to see significant improvement in the profitability of the film slate this year. … We are doubling down on our franchises and really reinvigorating them and reinvesting in them. … We are going to release 16 movies this year versus the eight films that we inherited. And we are really going to be at a steady state of over 15 movies per year.”

But in terms of the return of core franchises, “you do not really see that start to occur until 2027, just because of what the life cycle is of making a tentpole,” he said, citing the likes of the latest iterations of A Quiet Place and Sonic, as well as Call of Duty.

Of course, another, even bigger, deal is in the works in the form of the planned takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery, which would bring the venerable WB studio under the Skydance umbrella. “This is not about consolidation. It’s about reinventing the business,” Ellison argued during a conference call following the unveiling of the mega-deal. “As a producer and lifelong fan of film and television, I firmly believe that visual storytelling is one of the most vital art forms that we have. And we saw this as an extraordinary opportunity to bring together these two legendary companies with a combined 200-plus years of storytelling between them. It isn’t just about the legacy of these storied studios. It’s about building the next chapter of what stories can be and who they can reach.”

Profit: +28% year-over-year
Revenue: +16% year-over-year

Netflix’s 2025 revenue increased 16 percent to $45.2 billion and operating income rose 28 percent to $13.3 billion. The streamer, whose hit films and series included KPop Demon Hunters, Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery, Frankenstein, Stranger Things, Nobody Wants This, and Emily in Paris.

The company also grew its global subscribers from 301.6 million as of the end of 2024 to more than 325 million as of the end of 2025.

Netflix forecast 12-14 percent revenue growth in 2026 to $50.7 billion-$51.7 billion, driven by “increases in membership and pricing, plus a projected rough doubling of ad revenue.” And it vowed: “Our goal is to continue to grow engagement and we’ll do this first and foremost by improving our core series and film offering, including both originals and second run titles.”

The biggest deal that Netflix could have struck in its corporate history was a takeover of WBD. But the streaming giant folded instead of raising its bid once WBD deemed a sweetened offer from Paramount Skydance as superior.

Wall Street likes the idea of Netflix using its financial firepower for content investment instead of the mega-deal that would have come with execution and other risks. Wrote Wolfe Research analyst Peter Supino in a recent report: “While reaching a now-canceled deal for Warner Bros. and accelerating content spend to 10 percent growth in ’26 will cause some to question Netflix’s organic growth confidence, we think Netflix is better off pressing its scale advantage by investing more deeply in content.”

Profit: N/A
Revenue: +7% year-over-year

Disney remained on top in terms of global box office with a $6.58 billion haul in 2025. Its Zootopia 2 was the highest-grossing Hollywood movie of last year, raking in $1.85 billion. Plus, it ended up with the three top Hollywood films of 2025, all of which made the billion-dollar club, thanks to Avatar: Fire and Ash ($1.47 billion) and Lilo & Stitch ($1.04 billion).

In the negative column for 2025, Snow White, The Fantastic Four: First Steps, and Pixar’s Elio were among the disappointments of the year.

Disney’s fiscal year ends in the fall, but THR crunched the numbers for calendar year 2025 to use figures for the same period as the company’s peers. That said, Disney’s financials aren’t directly comparable to other Hollywood giants. Since a reorganization for the streaming age a few years ago, it hasn’t reported results for a focused film or studios unit, instead disclosing financials for its “content sales/licensing and other” segment, which THR analyzed. Analysts saw that as not comparable but as the closest equivalent to its former studio unit. However, starting with the final quarter of calendar year 2025, Disney changed its disclosures, including no information on its bottom line in this business segment.

Earnings conference call commentary suggests, though, that the home entertainment performance of Moana 2 helped boost revenue, in addition to the global box office revenue, which was up more than 20 percent over $5.46 billion in 2024. The bottom line for the calendar year can only be guesstimated.

Sources: Earnings reports and SEC filings. Netflix, Disney and Sony report operating profit, Paramount reports adjusted operating income before depreciation and amortization (OIBDA), while Warner Bros. Discovery and NBCUniversal report adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA). Profit and revenue figures in the billions are rounded and focus on the calendar year 2025 compared with 2024, even though Disney and Sony use different fiscal years.