Golden Globes announcers goof on stat about 2025's top movies
- - Golden Globes announcers goof on stat about 2025's top movies
Ryan ColemanJanuary 12, 2026 at 5:54 AM
0
Warner Bros. Pictures (2); Disney
Stills from 'A Minecraft Movie,' 'Lilo & Stitch,' and 'Superman'
2025 was a big year for animated films. But animation wasn't the only thing that made movies big last year.
While the team behind KPop Demon Hunters walked to the stage to accept the award for Best Motion Picture - Animated at the 2026 Golden Globes, announcers Marc Malkin and Kevin Frazier regaled the audience with facts about the film and its win.
"You talk to the stars of KPop Demon Hunters and you ask them, 'What's been the most special part of this?'" Frazier said, with Malkin responding, "It's James Cameron, who has given a big shout-out to this movie. James Cameron is one of those gazillion viewers of KPop Demon Hunters."
KPop Demon Hunters indeed set streaming records on Netflix, which doesn't, unlike most of its animated counterparts this year, translate to box office success. Frazier then underlined the success of animation at the box office this year by stating, "And by the way, the top five highest-grossing films worldwide this year were all animated" — which isn't entirely true.
Rich Polk/2026GG/Penske Media via Getty
Keegan-Michael Key and Mila Kunis present the award for Best Animated Film at the 2026 Golden Globes
Though the five highest-grossing films at the global box office this year all contained animated elements, they weren't all animated films. The top two were - China's record breaking Ne Zha 2, which grossed over $2.2 billion across its theatrical run, and Zootopia 2, which earned $1.6 billion in just a month, after releasing in late November.
The following three entries on the international top 5 liberally employ animation in their respective mise-en-scènes, but wouldn't qualify at the Golden Globes in the Best Animated Film category. Indeed, neither Avatar: Fire and Ash, nor Disney's live-action Lilo & Stitch remake, nor A Minecraft Movie snagged a spot on this year's slate, which also included Arco, Elio, Little Amélie or the Character of Rain, and Zootopia 2.
The Hollywood Foreign Press Association, which determined each year's nominees until they were deposed as the deciding committee in 2022 in the wake of a scandal, revised its rules around animation in 2014. From that point on, films had to be at least 75 percent animated in order to be considered.
Former HFPA president Theo Kingma elaborated that the primary work of that 75 percent or more must be "done by an animator or through hand drawings or stop-motion or pixelation."
That would discount Avatar, which primarily uses motion capture to bring the world of Pandora to life. In a December interview with the Motion Picture Association, franchise stunt coordinator and second unit director Garrett Warren even said, "Some people think that Avatar is very digital or animated, but it's not animated at all. If there's a wolf, that’s a human being on all fours acting like a wolf."
Get your daily dose of entertainment news, celebrity updates, and what to watch with our EW Dispatch newsletter.
Those rules also discount the No. 4 and No. 5 highest-grossing films at the global box office - Lilo & Stitch and A Minecraft Movie, which employ CGI elements in a piecemeal fashion. But both movies take place primarily in live-action settings.
The stat doesn't hold domestically either, which swaps Ne Zha 2 and Avatar out for Superman, which doesn't use any animated elements, and Jurassic World: Rebirth, which uses CGI imagery in a similar fashion to Lilo & Stitch and Minecraft.
Following its June release, KPop Demon Hunters, which took home the Golden Globe, became the most-watched film in Netflix history, animated or otherwise.
See the full list of Golden Globes 2026 winners.
on Entertainment Weekly
Source: “AOL Entertainment”
