What Were the Biggest Documentaries of 2025?

It's tough when the major theatrical distributors are largely abandoning nonfiction, but could 2026 be different?

Last Friday, I wrote about last year’s biggest independent documentaries, both in theaters (lead by “Becoming Led Zeppelin” and “No Other Land”), and on streamers (lead by “The Perfect Neighbor” and “Predators”). But there was an error in my previous post, which requires a correction, and some new observations that came to mind as a result of it.

First, the correction: My original box-office data for the top ten documentaries of the year was missing a film about the former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, “The Last Class,” that I had never heard about before (and some box-office tracking services apparently hadn't either).

Since opening in July, the film, which follows Reich’s work as an educator, earned a respectable sum of $1.175 million (through both U.S ticket sales and community screening sales combined, putting it at #5 for 2025). The sales were driven in large part by Reich’s own community (his Substack has over 1.1 million subscribers) and the work of their service distributor, Abramorama, according to Scott Glosserman, CEO and Founder of GATHR, whose company’s Theatrical on Demand platform was also employed as part of the hybrid community/commercial release and who first alerted me to the omission.

Abramorama’s Karol Martesko notes the film will continue to be playing through mid-June, before it hits commercial digital platforms. At the same time, it’s also played free Live Virtual On Demand (LVOD) screenings, which generated $309,000 in donations (not accounted for in the total gross).

Top Ten Documentaries at the 2025 Box Office

Now, the analysis: If you look again at the chart, you’ll notice how few of the distributors of this year’s top-grossing docs are established, deep-pocketed companies. Yes, there’s long-time veteran Sony Pictures Classics at the top, but that’s it. Magnolia Pictures has been at the doc distribution game for a long time (having hit records in the past with “RBG” and “I Am Not Your Negro”), and niche distributor Oscilloscope has also been around the block (see “Kedi”). But when a company called Keep Smokin’ is in the top ten, something seems amiss.

A few of these companies aren’t even distributors—Cinetic was the sales company on “No Other Land”; Wheelhouse Creative is “Secret Mall Apartment” director Jeremy Workman’s production company; and AMSI, another production company, has never released anything before. What’s happening?

Many of the biggest drivers of theatrical distribution of nonfiction are barely in the doc business anymore. In May 2025, A24 shut down its documentary arm in a blow of confidence to the market and leaving some of its projects in the lurch. Who now will get behind “Talk to Me”’s Philippou Brothers’ A24-produced Death Match wrestling doc due out sometime this year?

“Andre is an Idiot” (2025), sold by A24 to new company Joint Venture

And at Sundance 2025, everyone was talking about A24’s hilarious cancer doc “Andre is an Idiot.” Slick, funny, and moving, a 92% on Rotten Tomatoes, and winner of Audience and Editing Awards at Sundance, the documentary is only now finally getting a release in March 2026 through a new company called Joint Venture, run by former Archer Gray exec Vinay Singh. We’ll see what they do with it. More distributors, especially those willing to take a risk on a doc about a stoner’s colonoscopies, are greatly welcomed. Maybe they should partner with Keep Smokin.’ But I still can’t help but wonder what’s going.

Neon, as well, which was responsible for generating multi-million-dollar returns pre-pandemic for such docs as “Three Identical Strangers” and “Apollo 11,” released just one doc this year, Raoul Peck’s “Orwell: 2 + 2 = 5,” which didn't even make the top ten. Last year, they released only two docs, which also underperformed. And the year before, by my count, they released no new docs, whatsoever.

Is this a vicious cycle? Legacy distributors don’t want to release distributors in theaters in an aggressive way, because documentaries haven’t been performing well, which makes distributors not to want to release more documentaries in theaters.

This year, we’ll see. There are some possibilities for change on the horizon, both bad and good. Whoever greenlit Brett Ratner’s “Melania” documentary at Amazon/MGM should be ashamed of themselves, but the film will make some kind of noise when it releases in theaters later this month. (I hope it’s funny, at least.) Focus Features is set to release “Navalny” director Daniel Roher’s latest “The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist” in theaters in March. And Bleecker Street will be pushing out Oscar-winner Alex Gibney’s long-awaited “Musk” exposé presumably sometime this year. Any of these could break out, so we’ll see.

But, of course, paradigms are changing, and the standard models for releasing films—and gauging their success—is no longer what it once was. Abramorama’s Karol Martesko notes the box-office reporting entities, too, are “out of whack to begin with and are definitely not set up to properly reflect audience engagement in the current era of Direct To Audience (D2A) distribution.”

And as I’ve also been saying recently, I don’t think we should lament too much that documentaries aren’t finding crossover success in commercial arthouse theaters or multiplexes, because they are still a huge part of what audiences watch, as evidenced by “The Perfect Neighbor” and “Predators” debuting at #1 on their corporate streamers, Netflix and Paramount+, respectively. Docs are also a huge part of what audiences are seeing and enjoying at film festivals, filling theaters and winning festival’s overall Audience Awards.

“I for one have not been more bullish on the state of play since the late 80s,” says Martesko. “We are now on the cusp of many special innovations to further expedite the trend towards storytellers controlling their IP and more parts of their journey.”

To wit, as I was told by The Roxie Theater board co-chair Maida Lynn in a comment, there is an independent feature documentary about extreme birdwatching called “Listers” that premiered on YouTube in August and has drawn over 2.6 million views. That's a lot for a feature documentary without any theatrical release to boost it. (By comparison, “Becoming Led Zeppelin,” the highest grossing doc of the year, received 1.6 million views in its first three months online, according to FlixPatrol, while FRONTLINE’s most watched 2025 documentary “Syria After Assad” got 1.6 million views over six months.)

Maybe niche documentaries don’t have to be that niche, after all.