Why’ Becoming Led Zeppelin is 2025’s Most Exciting Box Office Success, So Far…
Becoming Led Zeppelin is not an especially outstanding documentary. While the anecdotes from the three surviving Led Zeppelin members are sometimes entertaining (especially when they’re spinning yarns about their earliest years), the movie eventually dissolves into a surface-level recounting of their earliest tours told with humdrum psychedelia imagery. It’s a movie that mostly comes off as “average” yet Becoming Led Zeppelin is more than just that. It can be a middling movie and also one of the most exciting box office success stories of 2025 so far. After all, this Sony Pictures Classics-distributed title is making a stand for post-2020 theatrical documentaries!
As of this writing, Becoming Led Zeppelin has grossed $8.7 million domestically, a tremendous haul that (depending on how it holds through March 2025’s first two weekends) could eventually exceed $10 million. only 68 titles have ever cracked $10+ million domestically. That number shrinks to just 43 when exempting IMAX-exclusive and DisneyNature titles. theatrical documentaries —after a mid-2000s boon brought on by Michael Moore and Morgan Spurlock— were seen as having a firm box office ceiling. Only the occasional Amy could clear the $3 million mark.
2018 saw all the change with hits likeWon’t You Be My Neighbor? ($22.83 million), RBG ($14 million), Three Identical Strangers ($11.44 million), and Free Solo ($17.5 million). They Shall Not Grow Old also began its theatrical run that year before going on to gross $17.9 million total in North America thanks to 2019 showings. At the end of the 2010s, the documentary was big business once again, with Apollo 11, Pavarotti, Amazing Grace, The Biggest Little Farm, and Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice all cracking $4+ million. Of course, then COVID-19 shut down theaters in March 2020 just as studios began launching new streaming services. These platforms needed new projects fast, and companies started stuffing Max, Disney+, Peacock, and more with documentaries that once would’ve gone to theaters.
Let’s be clear: the biggest late 2010s documentaries weren’t original avant-garde titles nor projects about everyday working-class people like Hoop Dreamsor Harlan County, U.S.A. They were celebrity documentaries that stood out in the theatrical landscape because they were about Aretha Franklin, Linda Ronstadt, Fred Rogers, and other pop culture fixtures. Arthouse and major studios alike never quite used the late 2010s documentary boom to try and launch a wide variety of documentaries into multiplexes. This meant that once the celebrity documentary migrated to streaming, the theatrical documentary market went quiet.
It didn’t help that studios themselves just ignored this terrain despite promising post-March 2020 box office numbers. Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain made $5.35 million in July 2021 while that same monthSummer of Soul grossed $2.3 million despite being simultaneously available on Hulu. Despite these good numbers, Roadrunner distributor Focus Features has only released one further theatrical documentary in the last four years. Soul distributor Searchlight Pictures has launched no new documentaries in theaters. Meanwhile, A24 has taken to financing a slew of new documentary films in the 2020s… but has infamously dumped them on streaming and PVOD platforms with no theatrical releases or marketing. A24’s dismal nonexistent handling of titles like The Sixth is a microcosm of documentaries’ struggles getting any respect in the modern cinema landscape.
This is why even a middling film likeBecoming Led Zeppelin doing so well is a triumph. Even with so many celebrity documentaries available on streaming, audiences are showing up to Becoming Led Zeppelin on the big screen even when it’s not playing in IMAX. No genre or medium of storytelling is ever dead in theaters. All it takes to revive the Western, musical, big-screen comedy, or documentary is a single hit movie.Becoming Led Zeppelin is proving that with aplomb. Exempting right-wing documentaries like After Death and Am I Racist?, it’s about to become the first theatrical documentary since COVID shut down theaters five years ago to exceed $5+ million domestically.
Could Becoming Led Zeppelin start a new trend of documentaries finally returning to the big screen? Magnolia Pictures already has a John Lennon & Yoko Ono documentary slated for an initial IMAX run on April 11, 2025 (mirroring the original one-week IMAX run Becoming Led Zeppelin had in early February), so maybe! Certainly the Sundance Film Festival this year produced countless new acclaimed documentaries (like a feature about Jeff Buckley) distributors like Neon, Greenwich Entertainment, Bleecker Street, Searchlight Entertainment, and others could pick up if they so desired.
The future is always uncertain, but as Master Oogway once pontificated, today is a gift (that’s why it’s called the present). Seeing Becoming Led Zeppelindo domestic box office numbers reminiscent of late 2010s documentaries in 2025 is very much a gift for those who want to see all kinds of movies flourish on the big screen. As an extra gift, No Other Land —a motion picture American distributors cowardly refused to distribute— has already grossed a little over $600,000 domestically despite having no distributor and an extremely limited theater count. I don’t want to jinx it, but it could (if it gets a post-Best Documentary Feature Oscar win bump) become the rare post-2020 documentary to slide past $1 million domestically.
That outstanding feature also finding some measure of box office success despite facing countless obstacles is yet another reminder that documentaries on the big screen can draw people to the theater. That’s always been true. Studios dumping all their documentaries on Disney+, Max, Peacock, and PVOD services (not to mention distributors like Neon moving away from the medium) inspired the 2020s box office slump for documentaries, not audiences inherently abandoning the medium theatrically. Becoming Led Zeppelin, as a film, is frustratingly inert considering the trailblazing band it’s chronicling. Its box office run, though, vividly reaffirms the financial viability of big-screen documentaries. That’s a rare glimmer of exciting hope in 2025’s domestic box office landscape that’s otherwise been pretty bleak. Consider this box office development the “good times” to 2025’s box office “bad times.”
Be the first to comment