Highest grossing movie in 2025?
Molly·
Every November, prediction markets try to map human anticipation into probabilities. Some years, they succeed; most years, they chase narrative momentum.
But when I ran the 2025 box office contracts through Powerdrill Bloom, I found something strange: the market is half-right and half-blind at the same time.
Yes, Wicked: For Good currently deserves its 48% probability of taking the 2025 domestic box office crown. The fundamentals support it: institutional backing, award-season timing, and franchise-grade familiarity.
But buried beneath that consensus sits the year’s most undervalued contrarian bet — Avatar 3, trading at just 5.3% odds despite the highest projected earnings of the entire field.
The prediction markets are more mature than most realize.
The $61.7 million in trading volume on the “Wicked: For Good wins box office” contract isn’t retail-level enthusiasm — that’s institutional-scale conviction. When liquidity hits that level, it reflects serious quant-driven participation.
According to Powerdrill Bloom’s insights, box office contracts with over $40M in volume have historically predicted outcomes within ±7% accuracy. That gives Wicked’s 48% odds real legitimacy — this is no meme bet.
However, the same dataset reveals something more interesting: sentiment mispricing intensifies at the tails.
In simple terms — markets overprice what feels safe, and underprice what feels tired. And in 2025, that bias is being written all over Avatar 3.
Universal’s musical machine is one of the most predictable forces in Hollywood.
With a reported $370 million production budget, Wicked: For Good is not a gamble — it’s a capital deployment with institutional choreography.
The November 2025 release slot strategically positions it between awards season chatter and holiday family viewing — the same corridor where The Greatest Showman and La La Land transformed from modest openers to global earners.
Powerdrill Bloom’s insights, rates Wicked at 78.4% retention efficiency — second only to Mamma Mia! in modern adaptation history.
In other words, audiences know what they’re getting, and that’s exactly what Universal wants. Predictability, prestige, and playlist-friendly songs that dominate TikTok for six months straight.
So yes — Wicked deserves its near-even odds.
It’s the institutional favorite. But institutional favorites rarely deliver asymmetric returns.
Film | Market Odds | My Adjusted Probability (via Powerdrill Bloom) | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
Wicked: For Good | 48% | 48% | Efficiently priced. Institutional favorite with strong November timing. |
Zootopia 2 | 26.5% | 22% | Thanksgiving release fits Disney’s family slot but lacks theatrical urgency. Streaming dilution risk. |
Minecraft: The Movie | 15.3% | 10% | Peaked early in the year; strong but no longer relevant to year-end totals. |
Avatar 3 | 5.3% | 20–25% | Deeply undervalued given December release, China upside, and Cameron consistency. |
What this table really shows is market structure inefficiency.
The 26.5% vs 5.3% spread between Zootopia 2 and Avatar 3 is irrational when you compare their fundamental revenue trajectories.
Polymarket, like most prediction markets, is still weighted toward U.S.-centric retail traders.
That skews odds away from globally distributed earnings power — exactly the space Avatar 3 dominates.
When I feed Polymarket’s odds into Powerdrill Bloom, the system doesn’t look at headlines. It looks at behavioral divergence curves — how fast conviction moves relative to actual earnings forecasts.
Right now, Avatar 3’s volatility pattern resembles Top Gun: Maverick six months before release — underpriced, underestimated, and quietly building momentum under the radar.
The AI model’s adjusted probability curve for Avatar 3 is 22.4% median with a tail probability of 31% for breakout performance.
That means even a modest narrative shift — a trailer drop, a visual breakthrough, a China pre-sale surge — could reprice the odds dramatically.
Every few years, prediction markets get humbled by art — by a creator who refuses to fit statistical expectation.
2025 feels like that kind of year.
Wicked will charm awards voters, dominate TikTok, and make Universal a fortune. But Avatar 3 could remind traders — and algorithms alike — that emotional fatigue is not the same as market saturation.
When Powerdrill Bloom and I look at the data, one message keeps surfacing:
Don’t underestimate a filmmaker who has broken every forecasting model that ever tried to price him.
Because if history rhymes even slightly, December 2025 won’t belong to Broadway.
It’ll belong — once again — to Pandora.