“The distance between what is said and what is known to be true has become a chasm. Of all the things at risk, the loss of objective reality is perhaps the most dangerous.” — Mon Mothma Andor Season 2
From Andora award-winning speech against misinformation and genocide to Elphaba fighting against the tyrannical regime of the Wizard of Oz in Evil: For good and Edgar Wright, viewing televised carnage as entertainment in running Man2025 has become the year of TV series and films study of resistance and revolution. But this wasn't just a year of characters fighting against oppressive regimes—it was also a year in which creators explored how easy it is to get caught up in the warm, deceptive embrace of those regimes' manipulative propaganda.
One of the most terrifying things about propaganda is how wide the net it casts. Whether you're purchasing a new product or developing a new belief, someone is deliberately trying to influence your decisions for their own benefit—and it's often impossible to track how that influence permeates our decision-making. A number of 2025 films and TV series have attempted to convey this idea from new perspectives, with exaggerated fictional versions of the world in which we live.
In a way, this is ironic because art is one of the most powerful tools of propaganda, capable of taking many forms and being used for many purposes.
Dan Erickson Severance pay The story follows a group of Lumon Industries office workers who undergo a procedure that separates people's memories of their personal and work lives. Show brings art promotion to an impressive level: Lumon's offices are characterized by their impersonality, with stark white hallway walls and sleek black doors. But between these corridors are hand-drawn portraits and landscapes, often depicting Lumon founder Cyrus Egan as a god-like being.
In these paintings, Cyrus is an inspirational figure, used to keep Lumon's employees dedicated to their work and loyal to Lumon as a whole. But in the second season of 2025, it was established that Lumon's art can also be a cruel weapon, causing mistrust between departments, as seen in the contrasting paintings. Gloomy barbarism of optics and design And The disaster of macro data refinement. Both paintings depict senseless killings, but who kills whom depends on the department. The paintings create tension between the optics and design departments and the macro data processing departments, even though their teams have more in common than not. The two departments' focus on each other distracts them from the movements of the real enemy: Lumon himself.
Art is similarly used as a propaganda weapon to spread paranoia in 2025. Evil: For good. After Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo) takes up a broom to fight back against animal oppression in Oz, her enemies Madame Morrible and the Wizard of Oz stoke the fears of the Ozians with flyers depicting her as a wide-eyed, snarling monster setting Oz on fire. Posters and banners throughout Oz contain slogans such as “BEWARE OF THE GREEN MENACE” and “SHE IS WATCHING YOU”, and the images distort Elphaba's facial features, making her look terrifying and demonic. Even the label “Wicked Witch of the West” arose from propaganda portraying her as an evil force and boosting the reputation of Glinda the Good (Ariana Grande).
For good shows how easy it is for a ruling party that controls the media narrative to distort people's perceptions and build support among the population by creating a scapegoat for all of society's problems and distracting from the oppressors who are actually creating those problems. Tragedy For good is that propaganda ultimately works. Elphaba is reviled, and every good deed she tries to do backfires due to forces working against her and twisting her words. Even when she tries to spread her own truth by writing “Our Wizard Lies” in the clouds, Madame Morrible magically turns the message into a threat. The rumor against Elphaba cleverly plays on people's prejudices against her skin color, and it is so effective that it is impossible to fight back.
Even Man of Steel couldn't escape propaganda manipulation in 2025. Director James Gunn has never hidden the fact that his view of the film Superman is rooted in politics and comes down to immigrants. Talking to Sunday Times in July, Gunn said, “Superman is the story of America: the immigrant who came from elsewhere and settled the country. But to me, it's fundamentally a story that says basic human kindness is a value, and that's what we've lost.”
It was a timely message given Donald Trump's stance. anti-immigrant decrees, attacks on student activistsAnd brutal repression against peaceful protesters during 2025, and rising tide of resistance against this. When Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult) denigrates Superman (David Corenswet) and undermines his support by targeting his origins and painting him as a captor, things quickly go south for the superhero. While Superman longs for a normal life with love, friendship and a regular job, Luthor creates a false narrative of his alien desires to denigrate him.
Luthor's manipulation of social media in particular serves as a mirror for the audience to show how something as simple as an online trend (who can forget “#Supershit”?) can help spread unfounded, self-righteous hatred like wildfire across the Internet. The way Luthor focuses on Superman's background is particularly insidious: by making Superman different and making him seem dangerous, Luthor makes any violence against him feel like justice.
Violence and genocidal intent, fueled by cunning and malicious disinformation, ultimately cause the Gorman Massacre in the second season of the Star Wars series. Andor. After painting Gorman's people as untrustworthy and greedy through a propaganda campaign, the Empire's leaders gun down peaceful protesters, sparking a riot. The Empire then uses its control of the media to portray the protesters as violent and out of control, further spreading condemnation against them throughout the galaxy.
The Empire controls the press, shaping what reaches its citizens and what doesn't – a censorship that seems particularly ironic. from a Disney product. The hand of the Empire's censorship even extends to attacks on political figures such as Mon Mothma (Genevieve O'Reilly), whose riveting speech to the Galactic Senate highlights the falsehoods being spread about Gorman's events. Attempts to stop it are thwarted by resistance in newsrooms. The nameless characters who oppose Imperial control suggest that anyone, anywhere can resist propaganda—it's not limited to just a few heroes. Despite this, ordinary citizens like Edie Karn (Katherine Hunter), whose scenes reveal what she has heard through the media or from her friends, still fall victim to the false narrative.
The winners write history, and in Edgar Wright running Manthe wealthy elite have been winning for years. When Ben Richards (Glen Powell) competes on a televised bloodthirsty game show for the entertainment of The Network executives and his rabid fans, he quickly learns that fair play is for fools. The network portrays him and other starving, impoverished people forced to participate in the games as lazy criminals who deserve to be killed for sport. When he learns that the Network is putting innocents in danger, his speech calling for a tyrannical system is edited to make it seem like he's gleefully bragging about killing the officers sent to destroy him. Through deepfakes and artificial intelligence, the Network demonizes Ben and portrays him as a villain, grossly abusing technology in what appears to be especially relevant the world in which we live.
Genre fiction's emphasis on propaganda will continue into the new year: “The Hunger Games: Dawn Before the Harvest”The film adaptation of Suzanne Collins' 2025 prequel novel will be released in 2026. Collins' dystopian teen series follows young rivals who fight each other in mortal matches to entertain the elite and assert the power of their rulers in the Capitol.
Due to the propaganda surrounding the Hunger Games, most citizens of the Capitol never question the morality of the games, and those who do are almost always silenced. Given that Sunrise during harvest this is a prequel, we already know that the main characters won't have a happy ending – it will take a generation later for Katniss Everdeen to conjure the spark of rebellion that brings down the Capitol. We'll likely see a film parallel to the book's much darker ending, which once again emphasizes that even in the face of countless horrors, the work required for critical thinking, the pursuit of peace of mind and the ease of going along with the crowd will be enough to destroy the truth.
