The Scottscars 2025

Welcome to the 14th edition of the Scottscars!

The annual movie awards blog that makes winning an Oscar feel like a consolation prize.

The movie industry had to bounce back this year after the end of the Sony Spider-Man Universe. Absolutely no Kraven the Hunter or Madame Web movies on this year’s slate.

But bounce back it did — from Amazon making a 90-minute advert for Amazon Prime and calling it War of the Worlds, to Cynthia Erivo getting emotional at a helicopter flying overhead during another excellent and completely normal human being Wicked press tour. Avatar once again blurred the lines between live action and animation, while more live-action remakes continued to dominate the box office.

So grab a cup of coffee, sit back, and have your favourite A.I. summarise this year’s Scottscars for you.

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Movie stats for the year

• Movies watched: 78

• Cinema visits: 29 times

• Most watched director: Hayao Miyazaki

• Most watched actor: Alan Tudyk

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The running order, as always:

• The 2025 Scottscars Awards

• Last year’s predictions

• 2026 movie predictions

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The 2025 Scottscars Awards

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 Animated Film of the Year

🏆 Winner: KPOP Demon Hunters🏆

Seriously! Deemed too big a risk by Sony (Asian cast, brand-new IP), it was essentially financed by Netflix and went on to become their highest-streamed original movie ever. And you can tell the amount of love that went into it. Everything is filled with expression, Korean culture, and some surprisingly catchy songs, and once again Sony Pictures Animation pushes the visual style into something new, avoiding ripping off their own Spider-Verse look like so many others have.

Runners-up:

• Flow — no dialogue, powerful journey. Made on a fraction of a Disney budget and won the Oscar — a true underdog story.

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The "Cinema Experience of the Year" Award

🏆 Winner: F1 in IMAX🏆

After putting us in the cockpit of a fighter yet in the excellent Top Gun Maverick- Joseph Kosinski puts us in the driver's seat of the wonderful F1 and there's no better way to experience it than in Imax. Cameras mounted to the cars, meticulous attention to detail, cut with authentic footage of a real f1 season- it's incredibly immersive. 

With a charming cast, subversions of the passing the torch and out of date veteran storylines and a fantastic soundtrack, it rounds out package to make an exhilarating watch, made for the biggest and loudest screen possible.

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 The “In Case You Missed It” Award

🏆 Winner: The Long Walk🏆

Director Francis Lawrence has directed all of the Hunger Games movies, and The Long Walk is yet again about a dystopian alternate reality where young people from different locations compete in a competition where the last person alive and standing wins… so you would be forgiven for passing over this one. But that’s where you’d be missing out.

Unlike The Hunger Games or similar dystopian films, The Long Walk follows a group of young men walking. Their only rule is not to stop. There is no time wasted on a kooky outside world; it stays with the walkers, and the character development, bonds, and backstories are slowly revealed, making each execution feel personal and intense. A great watch.

Runners-up:

• Grand Theft Hamlet — a wonderful documentary about out-of-work actors during the COVID pandemic who set up their own production of Hamlet… entirely within the world of Grand Theft Auto! A fascinating watch, genuinely hilarious and emotional. It may have been the winner of this award, but it was technically released in the UK in December of last year.

• Naked Gun - Jokes land alot more than they miss- Liam Neeson is perfect as no-nonsense Frank Drebin Jr and writer/director Akiva Schaefer of Lonely Island fame keeps the laughs coming

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Disappointment of the Year Award

🏆 Winner: Karate Kid Legends🏆

Your franchise goes dormant, so you take it in a new direction with a sequel series many years later. That series becomes a huge hit over the course of six seasons. Two months after the finale of that series, you return to the big screen — and then have it not relate to the series at all. Completely baffling.

Shame, because Joshua Jackson and Ben Wang are fantastic, but it feels weighed down by the studio clumsily trying to shoehorn Ralph Macchio and Jackie Chan in for the posters.

Runners-up:

• Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning — just didn’t feel very… “final”, did it? Underwhelming, unfortunately.

• Avatar: Fire & Ash — unbelievable VFX (seriously, compare it to the first and second films — it’s flawless now), but a played-out script that rehashes the first two movies instead of fully exploring the weirder side of Pandora.

• How to Train Your Dragon (Live Action) — disappointing that it’s almost a shot-for-shot remake of the original instead of adding something new and becoming its own thing.

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 The 'How had I Never Seen This' Award

🏆 Winner: Lilo & Stich (2002)🏆

In a boiling, cramped hotel room in Osaka, Japan, this came on the tiny, far-too-high wall-mounted TV. Normally the exhaustion or the aforementioned conditions would cause me to lose focus on any movie, and I had a lot of preconceptions about Lilo & Stitch — my only experience of it was the overly saturated Stitch merchandise and the live-action remake.

But I gave it a chance and couldn’t stop watching until the end. Turns out it’s popular for more than just the main character design — it’s excellent!

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Turd of the Year Award

🏆 Winner: Jurrasic World... Rebirth? Resurrections? Revengeance?🏆

2022’s Jurassic World Dominion was marketed as the end of the saga, bringing the Park and World casts together for another horrible, aimless sequel to finally put the series to bed. Cut to three years later and the studio has a new take, a new story that it’s bursting to tell. Bringing in renowned, established, gritty director Gareth Edwards (Rogue One, Godzilla), adding A-listers Scarlett Johansson and Mahershala Ali, it looked poised to shake some life and drama into the franchise — maybe the same way Nolan shook Batman into his vision.

And yet what was released was another half-baked slog with no stakes, messy subplots, a generic story, and a completely unremarkable continuation of the money train. Please let this franchise go extinct, at least until there is something new to say with it.

Runners-up:

• War of the Worlds — a 90-minute advert for Amazon Prime with occasional cutaways to Ice Cube reacting to aliens invading and threatening his family like “DAMN!” At least it was a different approach to an old IP, even if the execution was terrible.

• The Toxic Avenger — wasn’t for me. Maybe people like it?

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 The 2025 Scottscar Film of the Year

🏆 Winner: Marty Supreme🏆

A24 earn their fourth Scottscars Film of the Year award in a row! Timothée Chalamet is hypnotic as salesman/table-tennis player Marty Mausler, a prime hustler with a single goal: making it to the table-tennis world championships in Japan — no matter how crazy the journey gets.

Set in 1950s New York to the sound of a pumping ’80s soundtrack, and featuring not one but two Shark Tank sharks in the main cast (Gwyneth Paltrow returning to the screen and Kevin O’Leary making an honestly excellent debut performance), once the action starts it never lets up. Like Marty, you just have to take it in your stride and see where it takes you.

Runners-up:

• Sentimental Value

• Sorry, Baby

• Eternity

• F1

• The Long Walk

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Last Year’s Predictions

1. Avatar 3: Fire and Ash is delayed again.
   WRONG — it wasn’t!

2. Sony gives the Spider-Man film rights back to Disney/Marvel.
   WRONG — they didn’t!

3. A live-action Biker Mice from Mars movie is announced.
   WRONG — it wasn’t!

4. James Gunn’s Superman makes less than Man of Steel at the box office.
   CORRECT — $600m vs Man of Steel’s $670m. Not that it matters as much in today’s streaming-dominant industry.

5. Mahershala Ali’s Blade film is cancelled, or he leaves it.
   WRONG — he’s saying “don’t ask me about it” in interviews, but hasn’t officially left. Rumours say Jordan Peele may take over.

6. Both Captain America: Brave New World and Thunderbolts** fail to make over $500m.
   CORRECT — yes!

7. An Iron Giant sequel (or more likely remake) is announced.
   WRONG — it wasn’t!

8. The Naked Gun reboot performs very well critically and commercially.
   CORRECT… mostly — yes critically, so-so commercially.

9. Turd of the Year is Tron: Ares.
   WRONG — it wasn’t!

10. My Film of the Year is Mickey 17 (again!!!).
    WRONG — it wasn’t!

Score:
3/10 — I am getting worse at these.

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2026 Movie Predictions

• A24 sets up its own streaming service

• Netflix does not succeed in buying Warner Bros.

• Spider-Man: Brand New Day is grounded in the first half and goes off the rails in the second

• The Mandalorian and Grogu gets a similar underwhelming reception to Solo

• TMNT: The Last Ronin gets announced as an animated movie

• The new James Bond movie is set in the past

• Supergirl performs so badly it puts serious pressure on the new DCU

• Avengers: Doomsday exceeds the box office of Infinity War and Endgame

• Moana (Live Action) is Turd of the Year

• The Digger is Film of the Year

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That’s us for another year! Be good and don't let Netflix buy you, unless you get a good price of course.