Bare-chested swagger, out of control hair, thunderous guitar riffs … the heroes of 1970s hard rock are back, and burning up the cinema box office. Becoming Led Zeppelin, a film about the British band that dominated the music industry in the 1970s, was the most successful feature documentary at the US box office in 2025, taking over $10m, with a worldwide gross of over $16m. (Taylor Swift’s The Official Release Party of a Showgirl grossed considerably more, with $34m, but as an album-promoting clipshow it is evidently in a different category.)
Despite breaking up in 1980 after the death of drummer John Bonham, Led Zeppelin remain one of the world’s bestselling music acts, with estimated sales of over 200m records and 14.9bn streams. The band were famously press-shy in their prime, but agreed to take part in Becoming Led Zeppelin, which focuses on their early years up to the release of groundbreaking second album, Led Zeppelin II, in 1969. And contemporary audiences have responded – especially to the film’s presentation on the giant Imax screens, where it recorded Imax’s best ever opening weekend for a music documentary and became the format’s highest-grossing documentary of 2025.
