In 2000, one in five of the UK's ten biggest films at the cinema were sequels, remakes or franchise entries. By 2025 the figure was nine in ten — the steepest climb across the years Noodle News surveyed since 1989.
Noodle News classified the ten highest-grossing films at the UK box office in seven benchmark years, spaced roughly six years apart from 1989 — the year from which UK box-office record-keeping is considered comprehensive9 — to the most recently completed full year. A title counted if it was a sequel, prequel, remake or reboot, or a new entry sharing characters or continuity with two or more earlier theatrical films; a work's first-ever film adaptation of a book, game or TV series did not count on its own, however heavily its marketing leaned on the existing property.
The British Film Institute, which compiles the official UK box office, publishes its own annual tally of a similar phenomenon using a broader definition — one that also counts video-game and toy-line adaptations. On that basis, 12 of the UK's top 20 films of 2022 were sequels, prequels, remakes or franchise entries; 16 of 20 in 2023; 15 of 20 in 2024; and 17 of 20 in 2025.1234 The two series use different years, different list lengths and different rules, but they move the same way and land in a similar range — a useful cross-check between two independently built measures of the same shift.
Only one of 2025's top ten UK releases sat outside Noodle News's definition: A Minecraft Movie, the first screen adaptation of an established video-game property.8 The other nine — led by Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy and Wicked: For Good — were sequels, remakes or continuations of an existing series.
Seven benchmark years is a survey, not a census; a different set of sample years could trace a different shape, particularly through the noisier 1990s. Classifying a film as a "franchise entry" involves judgement calls Noodle News made consistently but that other analysts would draw differently — BFI's own published rule has broadened three times since 2022, which alone inflates its year-on-year comparisons somewhat. And a top-10 list is a narrow slice of a much bigger picture: it says nothing about the hundreds of films released every year that never come close to it.
The rising share invites two different explanations, and industry commentary doesn't fully settle between them.
Sequels and franchise entries carry a built-in audience, which de-risks the marketing budgets modern wide releases require; studios favour known IP over original scripts at every stage of financing. BFI's own write-up of 2023 treated original hits as the exception worth naming, noting that Barbie and Oppenheimer were "both…original, non-franchise films" — as if their absence from the franchise column were the news.2
The chart may measure where marketing spend and screens concentrate, not what gets made. BFI logged 822 UK and Irish film releases in 2023 and 834 in 2022 — the great majority original or small-budget — while the top 20 alone took roughly six in ten pounds of that year's total UK box office.2 On this view, original films haven't disappeared; wide theatrical release and the marketing spend that fills a top-10 chart have been rationed toward pre-sold titles, pushing mid-budget originals into limited runs or straight to streaming rather than out of production.
Both mechanisms probably operate together; separating how much each contributes isn't possible from box-office charts alone.