One of the funniest moments in cinema this year occurs deep in Ari Aster’s pandemic fantasia, “Eddington.” The screen has gone dark. Ominous music begins, all horns and rumbling bass. As the camera pulls back, we see what’s so sinister: an Instagram post on a phone screen, from a user named meganbailey_00. It’s just a black square, and beneath it is one phrase: #BlackoutTuesday.
It seemed like viewers either loved or hated “Eddington,” but both times I saw it that shot sent the entire audience into giggles, presumably remembering what now feels like a cringe-y moment of keyboard activism in the weird, wild summer of 2020. But “Eddington” is really about 2025. The big bad in the film is not the pandemic or mask mandates, or anything that scans as 2020-coded: It’s the giant A.I. data centers that the local government has agreed to allow on the fringes of town, which presumably will suck up the water in this already arid New Mexico region. Everyone is fighting about toilet paper rations and Dr. Anthony Fauci, but we’re watching from five years away and can spot the sick irony.
Whether “Eddington” felt exasperating or bracing depended on your outlook. But big-budget movies, with A-list stars and buzzy marketing campaigns, have not generally known how to address what might best be termed Our Current Moment. In fact, the Trump era writ large, with its technocracy, reality-show antics and social media misinformation beginning in his first administration in 2016, has not been notable for politically incisive filmmaking. There have been a few exceptions — “Get Out,” “Parasite,” a number of documentaries. For the most part, however, filmmakers trying to address this moment have swung and missed, turning out clunkers like “Don’t Look Up” and “Bombshell.”
Yet signs of life arrived in 2025. Not all of these movies worked. But it seemed as if, at last, Hollywood’s storytellers were wrapping their heads around how to explain this period and reflect it back to us. They looked to a variety of genres, and thought metaphorically, mythologically and historically. While at times the studios making the movies seemed to have missed the filmmakers’ memos, the productions knew exactly what they were about.
“Eddington” might have been the most controversial of 2025’s political movies, but Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners” was probably the most talked about. It combines music and horror and history for an explosively bloody story about the lingering effects of enslavement, colonialism and racism in one Jim Crow-era Mississippi town. Rather than settle for a baldly allegorical plot, Coogler opts for a tale that zigs and zags, allowing for many readings and serving up legends and vampires, gospel and the blues.
Shift from horror to superhero movies, which have long stumbled incoherently when it comes to politics. It shouldn’t have been surprising to see how much commentary James Gunn packed into “Superman,” given the Man of Steel’s deep roots as an antifascist, anti-corruption warrior for truth, justice and, well, you know. But in Gunn’s hands, Superman’s main antagonist is a hyped-up tech bro inventing what appears to be a janky A.I. clone of Supes himself, and who uses bots to spread misinformation and farm outrage against the hero. And that’s just one of the many clear references to our milieu in the film.
Among the most critically lauded films of the year is the Paul Thomas Anderson drama “One Battle After Another,” which loosely adapts and updates Thomas Pynchon’s Reagan-era novel “Vineland.” The movie is no screed or manifesto: It’s about what it means for political activism to evolve over generations. The characters are all figuring out that they’ll never get the world they’re working for, but they’re going to have to hand it over — a big topic in a time when “gerontocracy” is at the center of political discourse.
Meanwhile, Rian Johnson’s “Wake Up Dead Man,” the third in the “Knives Out” murder mystery series, takes on the rising tide of Christian nationalism and the power-hungry leaders who whip up cults of celebrity. He smartly marries jokes about DOGE and “feminist Marxists” with digs at insecure would-be internet celebrities who try to divide and conquer the world rather than better it.
These movies all land with a bang; others are squishier. “Wicked: For Good,” Part 2 of Jon M. Chu’s musical adaptation of the Broadway show, continues the first film’s metaphor for a nation’s slide into authoritarianism and a fight against fascism, but buries it under more palatable platitudes. Luca Guadagnino’s head-scratching “After the Hunt” tries to say something about identity politics and sexual harassment but is a hopeless muddle. “The Running Man,” from Edgar Wright, updates the 1987 dystopian film to deliver satirical commentary on inequality and entertainment, but is too broad to overcome more generic eat-the-rich sentiments. And “Tron: Ares,” directed by Joachim Ronning, circles around some idea about unchecked technocracy and A.I., but for the life of me I can’t figure out what.
Still, this isn’t a bad batting average, with movies about everything from the melding of Silicon Valley and politics to authoritarianism, nationalism and racism. And remarkably, most of these opinionated releases were also big hits. “Superman” and “Sinners” are likely to finish near the top of the year’s domestic box office returns, as will “Wicked: For Good.” “Wake Up Dead Man” will undoubtedly be huge on Netflix, and both “One Battle After Another” and “Sinners” will probably rake in plaudits all the way to the Oscars.
The idea that Hollywood has crammed (often liberal-leaning) political commentary into popular, high-earning and even critically acclaimed entertainment may not seem too surprising. But there’s some dramatic irony to it in 2025 because many of the companies distributing the movies seem to be distancing themselves from those same politics.
This is the year Disney, for instance, temporarily suspended the ABC late-night host Jimmy Kimmel after criticism of comments he made about the man accused of killing the right-wing activist Charlie Kirk. Some of that criticism came from the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, who suggested that his agency could take action against the network.
Paramount produced and distributed “The Running Man,” in which the villain is a corporation known as the Network, a giant entity that appears to have fused completely with the government and owns all news, entertainment and a few far worse things. Paramount, of course, paid an extraordinary $16 million to President Trump in July to settle a lawsuit over the editing of an interview on the CBS News program “60 Minutes.” About a week later, Carr announced that the F.C.C. would approve the merger of Paramount and the media company Skydance, owned by David Ellison, son of tech titan Larry Ellison, one of the world’s richest men.
Paramount has also recently shown interest in distributing “Rush Hour 4” — a favorite franchise of President Trump’s and reportedly at his request, with the director Brett Ratner at the helm. Ratner directed “Melania,” a documentary about the first lady, Melania Trump. Amazon Prime, which owns MGM, the company behind “After the Hunt,” reportedly paid $40 million for the rights to distribute the documentary, which will premiere on its platform in January. The streamer will also release a three-part series on her life and travels between New York, Washington and Palm Beach.
The reasons for moves like these and others can be cast as less partisan than pecuniary: Hollywood studios are ultimately beholden to shareholders and aim to maximize profits. Mergers and acquisitions, including those of media companies and movie studios — like Netflix’s agreement to acquire Warner Bros., which produced “Sinners,” “Superman” and “One Battle After Another” — can require convincing government officials to go along with the plan.
And given Trump’s history of paying personal attention to media companies, some feel the need to stay on his good side. Take competing bids from Comcast, Paramount Skydance and Netflix to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery: In Truth Social posts, Trump insulted Brian L. Roberts, the chief executive of Comcast, which owns NBC Universal (the studio behind the “Wicked” films).
Ultimately, Netflix announced a deal to acquire the company after Ted Sarandos, the co-chief executive of the company, visited the White House in late November, only for David Ellison to make a hostile bid for Warner Bros. That move, with partial backing from Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, was made after Ellison was spotted speaking with the president at the Kennedy Center Honors ceremony hours earlier.
Clearly money talks, and at the moment, it looks like Hollywood is talking out of both sides of its mouth. Yet that raises a question: In the future, will we continue to see films from major studios with political leanings? Or will they prove too risky for future corporate profits? Only time will tell — but 2025 may prove to be an inflection point for Hollywood, in more ways than one.
Alissa Wilkinson is a Times movie critic. She’s been writing about movies since 2005.
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