Now that 2025 is underway, it’s the perfect time to take stock of everything coming down the pike on the movie calendar. There are plenty of big releases hitting theaters this year, but streaming has also become a pretty competitive part of the movie landscape.
Amazon is among the studios that still invest in new movies, and while many of these movies hit theaters before arriving on streaming, they’re ultimately part of a broader streaming play. We’ve taken a look at the company’s slate for 2025 and determined that these five movies are the ones worth looking forward to most in the year ahead.
We also have guides to the best movies on Netflix, the best movies on Hulu, the best movies on Amazon Prime Video, the best movies on Max, and the best movies on Disney+.
Jason Statham gets a lot of heat for playing the same character in every movie he’s in, and you know what? That’s fair. Directed by David Ayer, a veteran of action moviemaking, and working from a script co-written by Sylvester Stallone, A Working Man stars Statham as a former black ops agent who is pulled out of retirement when his boss’s daughter gets kidnapped.
As he searches for her, he discovers a conspiracy that threatens to upend his entire way of life and bring him back into a world he thought he’d left behind. A Working Man doesn’t offer anything new, but what it does promise is Statham knocking heads together and being his usual badass self. Sometimes, that’s all you need in a movie, especially an Amazon one.
Will Ferrell and Reese Witherspoon’s combined star power should be enough to make You’re Cordially Invited worth a watch. The movie tells the story of the sister of a bride-to-be and the father of a bride who find that their luxury resort has been double booked.
When they decide to share the room, various forms of hilarity ensue. You’re Cordially Invited is the kind of romantic comedy we don’t get much of anymore, and while its premise is relatively convoluted, Ferrell and Witherspoon could sell just about anything.
We don’t know much about Mercy beyond its cast and a general premise, but the cast is enough to get us excited. This sci-fi movie follows a detective who has to go on the run after he’s accused of a crime he didn’t commit.
Starring Chris Pratt as the detective, the movie also stars Rebecca Ferguson and will be directed by Timur Bekmambetov, a tried-and-true hand in both Russia and the U.S. Mercy may or may not be an action masterpiece, but it definitely has enough star power to be one.
Upon its release a full decade ago, The Accountant was widely ridiculed, in part because it starred Ben Affleck playing an autistic man who was really good at killing people. As the years have passed, though, The Accountant has become widely beloved in part because the movie is so silly.
Now, we’re getting a sequel that will feature much of the original film’s principal cast, including Affleck and Jon Bernthal. Gavin O’Connor is returning as director, so if you liked the silly fun of The Accountant, you’ll probably also like the sillier fun of this follow-up.
What could be better than Viola Davis playing the president in an action thriller? G20 follows Davis’s president as she must protect her family, her fellow world leaders, and her country when the event is taken over by terrorists.
Directed by Patricia Riggen, G20 could be a fairly classy affair, or it could be pretty silly, but either way, Davis’ gravitas seems guaranteed to elevate the proceedings and turn this into one of Amazon’s most riveting releases of the year. Thankfully, we won’t have to wait until December to get it, either.
China just gave Hollywood a cautionary tale about AI filmmaking. Sanxingdui: Future Past, billed as the country's first fully AI-generated movie, hit theaters on October 23 and bombed at the box office.
According to Futurism, the film's reported $1.5 million production budget landed on more than 10,000 screens. Yet it pulled in only about $181,000, averaging roughly $20 per screen, making the budget difficult to recover.
Some of the best shots in Grok Imagine’s AI-made Odyssey don’t contain actors. Ancient landscapes stretch into the distance. Close-ups of grimy hands suggest people who have touched something rougher than a keyboard. For a few seconds, the illusion holds.
https://twitter.com/imagine/status/2113712964419063911
YouTube videos could soon look better without eating quite so much data, right? Thankfully, the platform plans to introduce a new video format called AV2 on its web player in early 2027, promising more efficient streaming and potentially fewer playback hiccups on slower internet connections. The big headline is a roughly 30% improvement in compression efficiency over AV1, YouTube's existing video format. That doesn't guarantee every video will use 30% less data, but it could make streaming a little easier on both internet connections and data allowances.
What is AV2, and why should viewers care?