Mason Thames Is In The Midst Of The Best Box Office Streak Since Jim Carrey In 1994. But Wait A Second, Who The Hell Is Mason Thames?!?

What if you airbrushed Jesse Eisenberg, or made a younger clone of Jake Gyllenhaal before the cloning machine was perfected? Apparently he would set (or at least tie) a box office record. Granted, it’s a niche one, but it’s still striking to realize that 18-year-old Mason Thames has starred in three #1 box office hits in 2025. He was the live-action version of Hiccup in How to Train Your Dragon, a summer smash; he reprised his role of Finney, the teenager haunted by a serial killer in Black Phone 2; and he romances Mckenna Grace in the younger half of a romance double feature in Regretting You. Now, that last one is something of a technicality; Regretting You grabbed the number one spot at the box office in its second weekend, just barely edging out Black Phone 2, on one of the worst weekends for ticket sales in modern cinema history. It’s also possible Black Phone 2 could edge it out once final figures are released – but then, that would be Lead Thames beating Supporting Thames. Either way, the kid currently has the top two movies at the box office.

The last guy to hit three number ones in a single calendar year? That would be Jim Carrey, who had perhaps the most auspicious breakthrough year in movie-star history when Ace Ventura, The Mask, and Dumb & Dumber came out mere months apart in 1994. Carrey extended this streak into 1998, with eight straight movies opening at the top spot, even black mark The Cable Guy. Thames, whose next couple of movies are indie road-trip comedies, cannot expect the same.

Still, no matter the asterisks that can be attached (none of Carrey’s 1994 trio were remakes or sequels, for one thing), it’s a surprising feat in this day and age, especially with the movies in question being a kid-friendly fantasy, R-rated horror movie, and old-fashioned romance. So what’s Thames putting out there with his bid for cross-genre movie stardom?

The easy answer would be, not a lot. He’s not bad in these movies. Hardly anyone gets cast in three big-studio leading roles as a teenager without having some kind of ability to hit marks, convey emotional shorthand, and generally hold the screen in some way. But there are times when he runs into the common young-actor conundrum: He was probably cast because he could approximate something like, say, a young Jake Gyllenhaal, which means that sometimes you can hear a phantom echo of “get me a young Jake Gyllenhaal type!” underscoring his acting. That’s forgivable in How to Train Your Dragon, where the whole damn movie is a simulacrum of something else entirely. The mere fact that he doesn’t much resemble Jay Baruchel (the voice of Hiccup in the popular animated films) makes him count as one of the film’s major alterations. And Black Phone 2 has him reprising what is his default signature role so far (though Hiccup, with a sequel on the way, may well eclipse it), sort of a darker iteration of a Stranger Things kid. It’s okay for there to be something not quite formed about Finney; it’s that teenage reticence that makes him such a (potentially) compelling foe for a powerful serial killer, even as the threat becomes ill-defined in the sequel. (Basically, Black Phone 2 is so poorly written that it’s hard to blame its sloppiness on any of the actors.)

It’s Regretting You that feels like the strongest test of Thames’ mettle, though there are outside factors to consider here, too, such as the movie being, if not quite as bonkers as some tone-deaf romantic melodramas, quietly unhinged in a way that makes it difficult to tell whether the actors have been miscast, or whether the whole movie has been mismade. Adapted from a Colleen Hoover novel, Regretting You has a dual-track romance that begins right around the time Mason Thames was actually born: 2007, in a scene where Allison Williams, Dave Franco, and Scott Eastwood all play 17-year-olds. (The youngest among them is 37.) Morgan (Williams) and her sister Jenny (Willa Fitzgerald) are dating Chris (Eastwood) and Jonah (Franco), respectively; 18 years later, Morgan and Chris have a daughter named Clara (Mckenna Grace), while Jonah and Jenny have recently reunited and had a baby together. But then Jenny and Chris both die in a car accident, causing Morgan and Jonah to discover what looks like it may have been a long-term affair. Morgan wants to keep this from a grieving Clara to protect her.

Where does international superstar Mason Thames fit into all of this?! He plays the dreamy lastie-lastie Miller Adams, a local teenager who’s also the son of someone Clara’s parents knew in high school. (Unless I missed something, this connection to their past doesn’t really amount to anything.) He’s mysterious yet sensitive, and Clara starts to fall for him, which causes chagrin levels in Morgan that seem more appropriate to secret cousins than two extremely clean-cut teenagers. (They are not secret cousins.)

Because Miller Adams isn’t on the same everykid level as the leads Thames plays in the other two films, he actually gives the actor a little more leeway, which Regretting You does not necessarily take advantage of. Miller Adams is also an aspiring filmmaker and because Regretting You comes from Paramount Pictures, this means his wall is plastered with exclusively Paramount catalog titles, including a prominently displayed poster for Patriot Games. (Or maybe Gen Z just loves Patriot Games?) This doesn’t have anything to do with Thames… except that he is tasked with creating a cinephile character whose movie literacy seems limited to his job at the local AMC, his beloved Paramount classics, and a final film he shows that suggests more of a talent for promposals than cinema.

Thames does adapt well to the romance-novel flirtiness of his character here; it’s probably the most traditionally charming of his three 2025 performances, even if the movie can’t give Miller three full dimensions. He also feels like he’s playing a composite: maybe of those other aforementioned actors, maybe of several different love interests (the outcast, the artist, the whimsical lover of life and all its challenges). Some would probably attribute that to the oft-cited lack of masculine assertiveness in contemporary leading men, but Thames really is a kid, and playing close to his real age; he’s not a twentysomething still clinging to teenage roles. It’s more that Regretting You creates a series of test balloons with its mismatched stars; Williams, Franco, and Grace have all been good in other movies, and here, along with Thames, they seem like they’re different ways of asking: Is this it? Does this work? Thames is just the latest actor to get movie-star parts in an industry that’s skittish about building movies around single personalities, the way that Carrey’s three 1994 titles were unapologetically, almost stupidly constructed around an untested persona. Thames is getting tested plenty – in front of millions of people at a time.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.