Long Range Forecast: THE SPONGEBOB MOVIE: SEARCH FOR SQUAREPANTS Squares Up Against AVATAR: FIRE AND ASH

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Long Range Forecast — December 19, 2025

The SpongeBob Movie: Search for Squarepants | Paramount

Domestic Opening Weekend Range: $25M – $35M

SpongeBob returns to the silver screen this December with The SpongeBob Movie: Search for Squarepants. It’s the fourth SpongeBob film and the first to hit theaters since The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge on the Run, which debuted in August 2020—albeit only in Canada and only on 300 screens, a result of the then-raging Covid-19 pandemic.

The high water mark for the franchise is 2015’s The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water, which opened to a fantastic $55M in February en route to a $162M run. We expect declining returns from this fourth installment of the franchise, which will face serious competition for screens that it didn’t face in 2015—largely in the form of Avatar: Fire and Ash, out the same weekend as Search for Squarepants and set to gobble up the vast majority of premium screen showtimes.

This is the second year in a row that Paramount has released an animated family title on the second-to-last weekend of the year, head-to-head against a Disney title. While Paramount’s Sonic the Hedgehog 3 brought in more debut box office than Disney’s Mufasa: The Lion King in 2024—$60.1M to Mufasa‘s $35.4M—the Avatar movies are a different beast altogether, and Fire and Ash will likely not cede the box office crown until several weeks into the new year.

A debut in the $25M – $35M range would put SpongeBob well above a handful of comparable mid-December animated releases from the last ten years, namely 2024’s The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim ($4.5M domestic opening); 2017’s Ferdinand ($13.4M), which opened opposite Star Wars: Episode VIII – The Last Jedi; and 2015’s Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Road Chip ($14.2M), which opened opposite Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens. An opening weekend performance for SpongeBob to aim for is mid-December 2018’s Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, which opened to $35.3M. That film, however, had more or less a clear path to a #1 debut, its fellow new releases being Clint Eastwood smuggling cocaine in the R-rated The Mule ($17.5M) and Mortal Engines ($7.5M), the DOA first film in Universal’s planned adaptation of the dystopian YA series of the same name.