“The space between what is alleged and what’s recognized to be true has turn out to be an abyss. Of all of the issues in danger, the lack of an goal actuality is probably essentially the most harmful.” —Mon Mothma in Andor season 2
From Andor’s award-winning speech towards misinformation and genocide to Elphaba combating again towards the Wizard of Ozs tyrannical regime in Depraved: For Good and Edgar Wright exploring televised slaughter as leisure in The Operating Man, 2025 has been a yr for TV reveals and films exploring resistance and revolution. But it surely wasn’t only a yr of characters combating again towards oppressive regimes — it was additionally a yr the place creators explored how simple it’s to be lulled into the nice and cozy, misleading arms of these regimes’ manipulative propaganda.
Probably the most horrifying issues about propaganda is how extensive a web it casts. Whether or not you’re shopping for a brand new product or fostering a brand new perception, somebody is consciously attempting to affect your choices for his or her profit — and it’s typically inconceivable to trace the methods these influences creep into our decision-making. Quite a lot of 2025 films and reveals tried to convey this concept from new views, in exaggerated fictional variations of the world we reside in.
That’s ironic, in a manner, as a result of artwork is likely one of the strongest propaganda instruments, able to taking many types and getting used for a lot of functions.
Dan Erickson’s Severance follows a gaggle of Lumon Industries workplace employees who’ve undergone a process that splits individuals’s recollections between their private and work lives. The present takes artwork propaganda to a formidable stage: Lumon’s places of work are characterised by their characterlessness, with their stark white hall partitions and modern black doorways. However between these corridors are hand-drawn and painted portraits and landscapes, typically depicting Lumon founder Kier Eagan as a god-like entity.
In these work, Kier is an inspirational determine, used to maintain Lumon’s employees dedicated to their work and constant to Lumon as a complete. However in 2025, season 2 established that Lumon’s artwork can be a bludgeoning weapon to breed mistrust between departments, as seen with the contrasting work The Grim Barbarity of Optics and Design and The Macrodata Refinement Calamity. Each work depict wanton slaughter, however who kills whom adjustments relying on the division. The work create pressure between the Optics and Design and Macrodata Refinement departments, though their groups have extra in widespread than not. Conserving the 2 departments centered on one another distracts them from the actions of the true enemy: Lumon itself.
Artwork is equally used as a propaganda weapon to unfold paranoia in 2025’s Depraved: For Good. After Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo) takes up her broom to struggle again towards the oppression of animals in Oz, her enemies, Madame Morrible and the Wizard of Oz, feed the Ozians’ concern of her with fliers depicting her as a wide-eyed, growling monster, setting fires throughout Oz. Posters and banners throughout Ozfeature slogans like “BEWARE THE GREEN MENACE” and “SHE IS WATCHING YOU,” with pictures that twist Elphaba’s options, making her look horrifying and demonic. Even the label “Depraved Witch of the West” comes from propaganda setting her up as an evil energy, and boosting the fame of Glinda the Good (Ariana Grande).
For Good conveys how simple it’s for a ruling social gathering that controls the media narrative to warp individuals’s perceptions, and construct bandwagonism among the many populace, making a scapegoat for all a society’s issues and distracting from the oppressors really creating these issues. The tragedy of For Good is that the propaganda finally works. Elphaba is vilified, and each good deed she tries to do backfires, as a result of forces working towards her and twisting her phrases. Even when she tries to unfold her personal truths by skywriting “Our Wizard Lies” within the clouds, Madame Morrible magically alters the message right into a menace. The phrase of mouth towards Elphaba cunningly performs on individuals’s prejudices towards her pores and skin colour, and it’s so efficient that she finds it inconceivable to struggle again.
Not even The Man of Metal might escape propaganda manipulations in 2025. Director James Gunn has by no means hidden that his tackle Superman is rooted in politics, and comes down on immigrants’ facet. Talking to The Sunday Instances in July, Gunn stated, “Superman is the story of America: an immigrant that got here from different locations and populated the nation. However for me, it’s principally a narrative that claims fundamental human kindness is a price, and is one thing we’ve got misplaced.”
It was a well timed message, contemplating Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant government orders, assaults on scholar activists, and violent crackdowns on peaceable protesters all through 2025, and the rising wave of resistance towards it. When Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult) smears Superman (David Corenswet) and undermines assist for him by concentrating on his origins and portray him as an invader, issues shortly go south for the superhero. Whereas Superman craves a standard life with love, friendship, and an unusual job, Luthor creates a false narrative about his alien wishes with the intention to villainize him.
Luthor’s manipulation of social media specifically holds up a mirror to audiences to indicate how one thing so simple as an internet pattern (who can neglect “#Supershit”?) can assist unfold unreasoning, self-righteous hatred like wildfire throughout the web. The way in which Luthor zeroes in on Superman’s background is especially insidious: By othering Superman and making him seem harmful, Luthor makes any violence towards him really feel like justice.
Violence and genocidal intent spurred by crafty, malicious misinformation finally triggers the Ghorman Bloodbath in season 2 of the Star Wars sequence Andor. After portray the Ghorman individuals as unreliable and grasping by way of a propaganda marketing campaign, Empire leaders gun down peaceable protesters, inciting a riot. The Empire then makes use of media management to depict the protesters as violent and uncontrolled, additional spreading judgment towards them throughout the galaxy.
The Empire controls the press, shaping what reaches its residents and what doesn’t — censorship that appears notably ironic coming from a Disney product. The Empire’s arm of censorship extends even to attacking political figures, similar to Mon Mothma (Genevieve O’Reilly), whose thrilling speech to the Galactic Senate spotlights the fabrications being unfold in regards to the occasions of Ghorman. Makes an attempt to cease her are waylaid by resistance throughout newsrooms. The anonymous characters pushing again towards the Empire’s management convey that anybody, wherever can resist propaganda — it isn’t restricted to a couple heroes. Even so, common residents like Eedy Karn (Kathryn Hunter) — whose scenes unpack what she heard by way of the media or from her mates — fall sufferer to the false narrative all the identical.
The winners write historical past, and in Edgar Wright’s The Operating Man, the rich elite have been profitable for years. When Ben Richards (Glen Powell) is thrust right into a televised, bloodthirsty sport present for the amusement of The Community’s execs and its rabid followers, he shortly learns that taking part in truthful is for chumps. The Community frames him and the opposite ravenous, impoverished individuals pressured into the video games as lazy, entitled criminals who need to be murdered for sport. When he finds out that The Community is placing innocents in hurt’s manner, his speech calling out the tyrannical system is edited to make it appear to be he’s gleefully bragging about killing officers who had been despatched to take him down. Through deepfakes and AI, The Community demonizes Ben and casts him as a villain, by way of a gross misuse of expertise that feels particularly related to the world we’re residing in.
Style fiction’s concentrate on propaganda will proceed into the brand new yr: The Starvation Video games: Dawn on the Reaping, the movie adaptation of Suzanne Collins’ 2025 prequel novel, is ready to launch in 2026. Collins’ dystopian YA sequence follows younger contestants who’re pitted towards each other in dying matches, to entertain the elites and ensure the facility of their rulers within the Capitol.
Due to the propaganda across the Starvation Video games, nearly all of Capitol residents by no means query the morality of the video games, and those that do are virtually all the time silenced. On condition that Dawn on the Reaping is a prequel, we already know the protagonists don’t get a contented ending — it’ll take Katniss Everdeen, a era later, to conjure up the spark of rebel that brings down the Capitol. It’s extra possible we’ll see the film parallel the ebook’s a lot bleaker ending, which additional highlights how, even within the face of innumerable horrors, the labor concerned in crucial considering, the will for peace of thoughts, and the convenience of going together with the gang might be sufficient to annihilate fact.
