Meet the new Jim Carrey: inside Mason Thames’ box office reign

2025 belongs to Mason Thames, if the box office numbers are anything to go by. The 18-year-old actor hit the big time when he starred opposite Ethan Hawke in the 2022 horror film The Black Phone as Finney Blake, a terrified teen being tormented by the film’s villain, The Grabber. Now, Mason has turned his star power into box office gold, with all three of his 2025 films hitting number one at the box office. This record was previously held by Jim Carrey, who starred in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, The Mask and Dumb and Dumber in 1994, with all three films reaching the top spot.

In 2025, Mason starred in How to Train Your Dragon (HTTYD), which earned $636 million globally, followed by Black Phone 2, which raked in $104 million worldwide, and the romance flick Regretting You, which brought in $50 million globally. In HTTYD, Mason nabbed the lead role of Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III, a bumbling young Viking who bonds with a rare dragon despite his village’s ongoing feud with the creatures.

The movie is based off the DreamWorks animation of the same name, which was released in 2010 and is one of the most successful film franchises to date. He then reprised his role at Finney in Black Phone 2, which saw his character being tormented by The Grabber from beyond the grave.

Regretting You is a romance film adapted from a book authored by Colleen Hoover, who is best known for works like It Ends With Us and Verity. In the film, Mason plays the sweet Miller Adams, who comes from the wrong side of the tracks, yet has a heart of gold. He is the love interest of the main character, portrayed by Mckenna Grace, who also happens to be his girlfriend in real life.

Catch a glimpse of Mason in the Regretting You trailer below…

“She’s so wonderful and she’s one of my favorite people on this earth,” he told News.com of his co-star. “So the fact I got to do that with her, and now I get to experience all this. It’s really crazy, but it’s all just fun.”

Mason revealed that his characters influenced each other, and he found it difficult to separate them. “There’s a funny thing about that. With Hiccup, I kind of changed his voice, and he had a walk and he talked faster,” he shared.

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“I was in that for about eight months, and so when we got to Black Phone, I was talking a little bit faster, and Scott would just sometimes get on his little microphone and he’d just go ‘I hear Hiccup, I hear Hiccup’. And I’m like ‘Oh, got it, got it’ and I would just like slow down and get back into Finney. It was a lot of fun.”

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“Just getting the chance to play all these different characters – it’s my dream,” he continued. “The best part of this job is playing characters so vastly different from each other, especially Finney and Miller. Miller is a sweet, kind, caring dude, and I’m a hopeless romantic at heart. I’ve always loved this type of movie, so I’ve always wanted to do something like that.”