The Biggest Bummers of 2025, From Tilly Norwood to All’s Fair

This year was meant to cement the theatrical comeback for adult-oriented, star-driven, studio-backed dramas: Sony’s A Big Bold Beautiful Journey, with Margot Robbie and Colin Farrell; A24’s The Smashing Machine with Dwayne Johnson; 20th Century’s Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere with Jeremy Allen White; Black Bear’s Christy with Sydney Sweeney. Some of these films were better reviewed than others, but all suffered the same box-office fate in quick succession: They bombed hard, placing the very future of movies of their type and scale into doubt. More robust holiday platform releases like Hamnet and, especially, Marty Supreme, have since revived some traces of optimism, but those grim fall months left a bitter aftertaste that’s proving hard to shake.

Dutch comedian, producer, inventor and apparent troll Eline van der Velden knew exactly what the already demoralized entertainment industry needed in 2025: Tilly Norwood, her dead-eyed fembot masquerading as an AI “actress.” And, yes, we can mock her appearance because she’s not real. Van der Veldon’s September assertion that Norwood’s zeroes and ones would soon be represented by a major agency sent actors across the globe into a rage, cementing this dystopian, glorified gif as the avatar for Hollywood’s collective AI anxiety. Betty Gilpin even penned a real “chef’s kiss” open letter to her new digital nemesis. Norwood’s creator is still out there banging the drum about BS film projects that won’t come to fruition on any platform of consequence — Really, she can’t even crack 68k IG followers? — but stay vigilant. Let’s keep Tilly where she belongs, on the sticky hard drive of some lonely incel’s PC. 

Once upon a time, the WWE Network was a standalone streaming service that cost $9.99 per month. It included all the pro-wrestling promotion’s pay-per-views, what we now call Premium Live Events, new and old, as well as (delayed) episodes of weekly episodic series Raw and SmackDown and other ancillary programming. It was a really good deal, and when Peacock bought it, it became a great deal. Peacock with ads, including WWE Network, initially cost $4.99/month; ad-free Peacock, which also included the WWE programming, was $9.99 — the same price as the WWE Network’s standalone days. Well, nowadays it’ll cost fans a lot more to watch their Superstars: Netflix has Raw, ESPN has (most of) the PLEs, Peacock has the others (and SmackDown) — so right there’s you’re talking like $50/month — or more. The WWE Universe yearns for the good ol’ days.

For more than a decade, the battle between HBO and Netflix was one of quality vs. quantity. It got a hell of a lot closer toward the end of their war when Netflix had accumulated a bunch of its own legitimate premium programming. Well, the competition is basically over at this point, as Netflix appears to be the winner of Hollywood’s Warner Bros. sweepstakes. It’s a bummer for a bunch of reasons: 1) the competition brought their bests out, and 2) there is a genuine reason for concern about the future of the HBO brand, the cream of the crop in prestige TV. Don’t mess this up Netflix — we want our HBO. 

Is Grand Theft Auto VI ever going to come out? I mean, yes, but, like, when? (And then for real, when?) Well, the current release date is Nov. 19, 2026, but maybe don’t mark your calendar with a Sharpie. GTA 6 was originally supposed to be out by, well, now — but it has faced multiple delays. In May, the game was pushed to May of 2026. By November, the date had been pushed again to November 2026. Rockstar Games is doing the right thing by making sure the game is, indeed, finished — and you’d better believe the price tag is going to reflect the effort.

For reasons best understood by Ryan Murphy, Ryan Murphy likes to create autumnal gluts of Ryan Murphy. Last year, Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story, American Sports Story: Aaron Hernandez and Grotesquerie came out within weeks of each other. In 2022, it was Dahmer — Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story and The Watcher. This year? Monster: The Ed Gein Story (co-created by Ian Brennan) kicked off October on Netflix, reminding discerning viewers of how repetitive that ghoulish, exploitative franchise has become in its leering condemnation of the true-crime genre and people who love it. Then, one month later, Murphy teamed with Jon Robin Baitz and Joe Baken for the head-scratching All’s Fair, a spectacularly tone-deaf legal procedural in which the largely inanimate Kim Kardashian got to steal screen time from one of the best female casts in recent memory. Both shows were awful. Both shows were hits. Congrats to all involved. 

When Squid Game ended in 2021 by setting up a second season, our reaction was one of cautious optimism. True, the story had seemed complete as is, but who were we to doubt a show that had thrilled us so much already? When Squid Game finally returned in 2024 with half a story that retraced too much of the first season while adding too little surprise or depth, we continued to hope. Surely, we told ourselves, it would all pay off in season three. Then season three came out, and … well. Sluggishly paced and thinly drawn, with an overabundance of nasty plot twists but a dearth of any new insights, it did nothing but confirm what everyone had been telling Gi-hun all along: He’d have been better off leaving that island in the past and letting himself and us move on with the rest of our lives.

Naked Dressing was prevalent yet again in 2025, with Bianca Censori baring, yes, everything at the Grammy’s in February in a nothing-there dress ‘designed’ by her husband Kanye West, through to Sydney Sweeney freeing the nipple in a sheer Christian Cowan at a women’s empowerment event in October. The interpretation of whether this is actually liberating women or just playing up to the male gaze is obviously up to the wearer, but did Censori truly look as if she was a willing participant in this attention-grabbing moment?  Or is naked dressing just yet another way of exploiting women’s bodies? We can trace this trend as far back as Marilyn Monroe singing Happy Birthday to President Kennedy in her Jean Louis gown, but none of these women can — thank you, Elton — hold a candle to Marilyn.

If satire is dead, it was officially buried the moment Donald Trump accepted a “Peace Prize” from soccer world governing body FIFA. The organization that gave us Qatar, endless corruption probes and $700 “dynamic pricing” World Cup tickets decided the one person who most embodied peace and harmony in 2025 was our 47th president. If you made this call on the field, VAR would have chalked it off. 

The only clear winner in the Blake Lively versus Justin Baldoni courtroom saga was collective schadenfreude. What began as a celebrity dispute ballooned into a rolling public demonstration of how not to behave, on set, in the media or under oath. Each new filing somehow made everyone involved look worse. Choosing sides became impossible and, by the end, the prevailing emotion wasn’t outrage or sympathy but fatigue, the kind that comes from watching very rich, very unpleasant people litigate their privilege in public. 

There are few more soul-crushing downers for a critic than watching a celebrated storyteller drive off a cliff. At 85, James L. Brooks could stay home polishing his Oscars and Emmys instead of toiling over the stunningly inept Ella McCay, an ensemble comedy about an idealistic young woman navigating bumps in the road of family life and her career in state politics. Nothing works in this head-scratcher, because the story has no footing in our contemporary world or even in some inauthentically nostalgic version of our past. The incisive grasp of character that made Brooks a national treasure is gone. Also, a word to Jamie Lee Curtis and Woody Harrelson: You’re in your 60s, please don’t try to be cute. It’s unseemly. 

Not to get too moralistic about the way the entertainment industry burns through giant wads of cash, but when countless gifted directors can’t get promising projects off the ground, there’s something obscene about Netflix slapping down $320 million for Anthony and Joe Russo to play in the moldy retro-futuristic sci-fi toy box of The Electric State. A clash of the bots that has precisely nothing original to say about the ongoing march of A.I., this soulless comedy adventure’s main achievement is to show that Chris Pratt is on a Mark Wahlberg level in terms of limited range, and people need to stop trying to make Millie Bobby Brown happen as a movie star.