Our relationships to people and trends in pop culture come and go, and after a tumultuous year with huge shifts in society and politics, it’s not surprising we’ve fallen out of love with some things.
These are the people and things that jumped the shark, that gave us pause and an opportunity to re-evaluate.
Of course, not all things are equal. Feeling slightly iffier about Hugh Jackman or Keith Urban doesn’t make them wholesale villains like tech barons. But the conversation has shifted, and we just don’t feel the same way as before.
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SYDNEY SWEENEY
Sydney Sweeney in an ad campaign for American Eagle jeans. Credit: American Eagle/Supplied
Twelve months ago, Sydney Sweeney was riding high. She was the object of fascination and, more importantly, respect. OK, she was hot, but she was also talented and known for being savvy, producing her own work.
She had a slew of endorsement deals — paying the rent was no longer a problem — and was about to release a slate of new movies.
Then that ad, you know the one, dropped. Sydney Sweeney has good jeans. Rightly or wrongly she was tangled in a white supremacy eugenics scandal, the argument being that all those behind it knew exactly what the jeans/genes homonym was implying.
She declined to address the building scandal, and next minute, the revelation emerged she had registered as a Republican in 2024 after Donald Trump won the party’s pre-selection process to be its presidential candidate. Those old birthday party photos with the “blue lives matter” t-shirts didn’t seem so innocent anymore.
Perhaps you think it was all overblown, or perhaps you think she was trolling when she kept getting papped hand-in-hand with internet villain Scooter Braun. The sculpted blonde Fox News bob she wore on Jimmy Fallon, well, that didn’t help.
In an ideal world, Sweeney’s politics shouldn’t matter, but in 2025 everything is a culture war flashpoint.
Worse than that, those new movies failed to penetrate the culture, at least not in a good way.
Eden, the Ron Howard film she shot in Australia with Jude Law, couldn’t even find a distributor and was eventually quietly released to no fanfare. Christy, the boxing biopic, opened to one of the worst screen averages of the year. Echo Valley, a streaming movie, was met with, at best, mixed reviews.
The shine was off. Sweeney was not going to save the box office. Now that’s the real sin in Hollywood.
TECH BILLIONAIRES
What a sight. Credit: Kenny Holston/The New York Times/Bloomberg
It’s been a while since anyone has seen anything but black hats atop Silicon Valley’s egomaniacal heads.
Previously, the advances in tech were sold to us as improving our lives, opening up the world and ushering in a utopian ideal of progress and innovation. Instead it’s pushed an agenda of social division and boundless greed.
Big tech cares not for anything outside of themselves, and no one will stand in the way. Not artists whose copyrighted work they’ve stolen to train AI models, not children whose emotional wellbeing they’ve endangered, and not democracy and truth, which their algorithms eschew because they don’t get the same engagement numbers.
Technology is apolitical? As if. Certainly its masters aren’t, and that was searingly apparent in January when at Donald Trump’s inauguration, the tech oligarchy was lined up behind him in a gesture of fealty.
There they stood — Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Apple’s Tim Cook, Google’s Sundar Pichai, and bro-in-chief himself, Elon Musk. Elsewhere in the room, OpenAI’s Sam Altman and TikTok’s Shou Zi Chew.
Musk had already revealed his darkness and would go on this year to wreak even more havoc as part of the US administration with his DOGE unit and then his blatantly racist Grok AI.
It’s not that everyone was expecting more from his seemingly less troll-y peers, but that photo of them all together, grinning like fools, flanking Trump, was just a reminder that tech bros are in it for themselves.
It’s paid off for them anyway. To the tune of $US698 billion ($AU1.042 trillion), which is how much the 10 richest Americans (nine of whom are tech barons) increased their wealth by in 2025, according to Oxfam. Meanwhile, 50 per cent of American children are in low-income households.
And it doesn’t stop there. In just the past fortnight they also got the US government to do their dirty work by banning five EU figures from entering America. The reason? Those people are involved in the EU’s Digital Services Act, a legislative attempt at countering hate speech and disinformation online.
For now, that collective villainy is being reflected in the stories that are told. Jesse Armstrong (Succession) quickly wrote, shot and then released Mountainhead, a satire-cum-horror about four tech bros.
Next year, we’ll see Aaron Sorkin’s follow-up to The Social Network, called The Social Reckoning, about Facebook’s knowledge its platforms were harming people, and chose to not do anything about it because, money.
But censorship of critical perspectives has risen — tech money, such as that of Oracle founder Larry Ellison’s billions and Bezos’ ownership of the Washington Post, is buying up media companies.
BRIGITTE MACRON
Emmanuel Macron and Brigitte Macron. Credit: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images
The first lady of France has always been a curious figure, given the age gap between her and her husband. But she is chic and stylish and seemingly affable, and even cameo-ed as herself on Emily in Paris, which, well, you could take that either way.
She’s also a sympathetic figure given she’s been the victim of years of vicious and unfounded online rumours that she was born a man, spread by fringe and mainstream influencers and amplified by algorithms (see above: tech billionaires).
She and Emmanuel Macron have even filed lawsuits against those who have perpetuated the claims, including against Candace Owens, a far-right influencer.
So, yes, we should be on her side. We were on her side.
Then, this month, she was filmed backstage at the Folies Bergere theatre in Paris talking to actor and comedian Ary Abittan, who was about to perform that evening. Abittan has previously been accused of rape but never stood trial because of insufficient evidence.
The night before Macron’s attendance at the theatre, protesters had disrupted Abittan’s show by yelling out, “Abittan, rapist!”.
When Abittan expressed to Macron that he was feeling nervous about the forthcoming performance, the French first lady called the protesters “sales connes”, a particularly vile, sexist slur which roughly translates to “dirty bitches”, and promised to throw out any other protesters.
She’s now facing a legal complaint from multiple women’s rights groups and organisations. Siding against the sisterhood while buddying up to an accused rapist, allegations he denied, isn’t a good look.
France has had a slow reckoning around sexual violence against women, especially highlighted last year by the trial that rocked the world, in which dozens of men were convicted of raping Gisele Pelicot, who was drugged by her husband and then “offered up” to other men.
Macron did a sorry-not-sorry — “sorry if I hurt victims” — but insisted they were “private” comments so therefore she can’t regret them, drawing a distinction between what she says in public and what she might think personally.
Unrelated but maybe not, she also posed for photos with Johnny Depp at Dior’s Paris Fashion Week show. Sometimes famous people accidentally end up in awkward photos. But then again, Charlize Theron knew exactly how to blank Depp.
KEITH URBAN
Nicole Kidman says her marriage to Keith Urban has “suffered irreconcilable differences”. Credit: AAP
Oh no, not our Nic. Keith Urban may be an Australian cultural icon, according to Americans, but no one stands above Nicole Kidman.
Many of us only know of his existence because he married Kidman. He probably has some popular songs but you’d struggle to name one.
Waking up to the news that Kidman and Urban were headed for divorce was genuinely shocking, because every wants the best for Kidman. She’s Australia’s darling and she also works bloody hard. She deserves to be happy.
All reports suggest the separation was not Kidman’s choice and that she did everything she could to try and save the relationship. In the end, he walked away.
Of course, we don’t know what goes on in someone else’s marriage, but what we do know about Kidman after her decades in the spotlight is that she is someone who cares deeply about family. She was very close to her parents, and she still is to her sister Antonia and her brood.
Only months into their marriage, Kidman had his back when his addiction issues saw him checking into rehab for a third time. She was the one who staged an intervention after he started to spiral. Kidman is someone who gives. She moved to Nashville for him!
Rumours that Urban had already moved on with a much younger woman, a musician on his tour, was later denied by a friend of that woman.
Sorry, Keith, but we stand behind our girl.
QUIET LUXURY
Succession characters dressed in quiet luxury. Credit: HBO
Quiet luxury didn’t do anything bad. But it got kicked in the head as a renewed age of flashy materialism took over the culture.
Never mind understated and elegant. That went out the door when Loro Piana became a mainstream, household name.
It used to be that if you were wearing one of the brand’s $1000 cashmere caps, the opulence was in the fact you and few others knew the value of that hat. You would never tell anyone, other people knowing was crass.
But crass is in. Maximalism is in. Look around the White House, now a palace gilded in blinding, tacky excess, as if some toddler was let loose with a dozen glitter pens. Even Palazzo Versace thinks it’s too much.
We live in a time when someone’s importance is now measured by the number of seats on their PJ. That’s, uh, private jet to you, pleb. This was always the case, but you didn’t brag about it.
Now, it’s the uber wealthy’s obligation to showcase everything too much money can buy. Everything that is except taste.
Look at the Bezos-Sanchez wedding extravaganza in Venice this year. A bubble party on a yacht. Hiring out spare venues as decoys and back-ups. That gauche Dolce and Gabbana wedding dress.
Maybe people got sick of holding back, and now with the showiest braggart of all, large and in charge on the global stage, those itchy people finally have permission to fully embrace the “flaunt it” ethos, whether they actually have it or not.
RIP quiet luxury, but we hope you make a comeback. Hey, Pantone just chose “cloud dancer”, a shade of white as its 2026 colour of the year, so maybe that’s sooner than you think.
BIG-BUDGET STREAMING MOVIES
You probably watched Red Notice. You definitely don’t remember any of these characters’ names. Credit: Netflix
Not long ago, it was a free-for-all when it came to streaming budgets, as if every platform had their own personal Oprah Winfrey, screaming at commissioning meeting, “You get $200 million, you get $200m, everyone gets $200m!”.
Netflix was responsible for the majority of the most expensive movies made for streaming, although Prime Video got in there too, ahem, Red One ($US250m), ahem. The big money was necessary to attract the big talent, who would otherwise be resistant to working with companies that didn’t put their films in cinemas, a deal-breaker for some.
That’s how we got movies such as The Gray Man, a $US200m action thriller about a CIA agent on the run, starring Ryan Gosling and Chris Evans. Or Red Notice, a $US250m action thriller about a cat-and-mouse chase between an FBI agent and some thieves.
Or Heart of Stone, a $US150m action thriller about an intelligence agent trying to protect an AI system. Yes, there’s a pattern.
There were also Zach Snyder’s Star Wars rip-offs, the Rebel Moon movies which were very, very, very loud. And Michael Bay’s 6 Underground, an action movie about people who faked their deaths so they could stage a coup d’etat.
But 2025 had the back-breaker. Enter The Electric State, a direct-to-streaming movie with a production budget of, hang on to your hats, $US350m. That’s only $US50m less than Avatar: Fire and Ash’s reported budget.
The thing about all these streaming movies is that the economics of them are hazy. There are no box office receipts, and while Netflix likely has some formula of how many subscriptions one particular title generates, surely it didn’t sell or keep $US350m worth for The Electric State.
The other thing about all these streaming movies is that they’re bad. Some are just mediocre but most are woeful, make-it-stop terrible.
It’s unlikely we’ll see too many more streaming movies with these price tags because no matter how many people supposedly watch them (ie. pressed play and then went on to scroll on their phones for the next two and a half hours), they don’t add anything to the culture and have no enduring impact other than as an example of how awful these big-budget streaming movies are.
Netflix might even know that. During an interview for The Electric State, one of its filmmakers, a Russo brother, pointed out how weird it was for Netflix to spend so much money on a movie they don’t bother “eventising” with a massive marketing roll-out.
Did you watch The Electric State, and actually remembered it? Count yourself lucky if you didn’t.
TAYLOR SWIFT
Taylor Swift’s motto is “always be marketing” (AP PHOTO) Credit: AAP
First up, the Swifties will disagree, because they are nothing if not undyingly loyal to their queen. So, despite risking their wrath, it has to be said. This year was the year Taylor Swift took it too far.
Swift was always kind of uncool, that was part of her brand with her heart-on-sleeve songwriting and a general narrative about being the ignored girl in high school. Everything stems from this intentionally relatable, semi-milquetoast persona.
She’s never been incendiary or chic. She’s not Charli XCX or Rihanna.
The girl next door thing can be a very effective mask for the other aspect of Swift, which is that she is a savvy businesswoman. So savvy. So effective. It’s how she’s amassed a fortune of $US1.6b. Good for her.
But that comes from always being on the hamster wheel, always marketing, always selling, including tickets to an in-cinema movie that’s just 90 minutes of content you’d be embarrassed to include as extras on a DVD.
Imagine that, charging people to watch what should’ve been thrown up on YouTube for free. But this is the same woman who has released endless versions of the same vinyl, often on the same day as someone else’s actual album drop.
Look, everyone has to make money even Swift, how else are you going to send your private jet to pick up your fiancé? But there’s a line between doing business and exploiting devoted fans.
Speaking of that fiancé, the deliberate slow drip of anything to do with her engagement and pending wedding to Travis Kelce is so cringe. But as two consummate marketers they seem suited to each other, and make of that what you will.
After that culture-shifting Eras tour in 2023 and 2024, Swift should have just taken a break. She’s earned it, and more than that, we had too. We would’ve survived a year, just one year, without the Swift circus.
Instead, she released her 12th album, with all the attendant brouhaha, and after all that, it wasn’t even a good record. A docuseries about a tour that had already been covered to death, which had yet another potential “Easter egg” about her next album.
SPACE TRAVEL
Pop star Katy Perry and five other women launched into space on a Blue Origin rocket and successfully returned to Earth on Monday, marking the first all-female spaceflight in more than 60 years. The crew lifted off from West Texas at 9:31am ET and travelled to the edge of space at an altitude of 100km, where they experienced a brief period of weightlessness before returning to Earth in a flight lasting around 11 minutes, according to a live broadcast by Blue Origin, the space company founded by billionaire Jeff Bezos. Credit: Blue Origin/Blue Origin
In 1962, John F. Kennedy told the American people that by the end of the decade, they will go to the moon. Technically, it was another aspect of the Cold War against the Soviets, about beating them so the Stars and Stripes would be the first flag planted on the moon’s surface.
But what it represented was human endeavour and exploration.
As Aaron Sorkin said about going to Mars, via Sam Seaborn, in The West Wing, “We came out of the cave, and we looked over the hill and we saw fire, and we crossed the ocean and we pioneered the West, and we took to the sky. The history of man is hung on a timeline of exploration, and this is what’s next.”
OK, “pioneered the West” was slaughtering and driving Native Americans off their land, but you get the sentiment.
Maybe JFK wouldn’t be surprised that six decades later space travel is less about the ingenuity and progress of the human race and more about tourism for the mega rich.
This year was the year Katy Perry ruined space.
Not Perry specifically, because she was merely a passenger, albeit one who couldn’t help herself but sing Louis Armstrong in space, waxing on about feeling “connected to love” and literally kissing the dirty ground.
But the sight of an all-women crew including Perry, TV presenter Gayle King and Jeff Bezos’ then fiancée Lauren Sanchez, was worthy of a vomit emoji.
Hey, we love seeing sisters riding high, like Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space who made 48 orbits of the Earth in 1963, or Eileen Collins, who was both the first American female pilot in space and the first female mission commander.
But Perry, King and Sanchez are not scientists. They’re mascots for a private space travel program that caters only to the whims of people with too much money. Their 11 minutes up there wasn’t anything other than yet another manifestation of the widening wealth gap.
HUGH JACKMAN
Hugh Jackman with Sutton Foster in October. (Photo by Steve Granitz/FilmMagic) Credit: Steve Granitz/FilmMagic
Australia loves Hugh Jackman. He’s a local boy who did good, conquering the stage and screen. He can play a superhero and he can twirl and sing. Plus, that smile. He could charm the pants onto a nudist.
His brand is that he’s wholesome, he’s lovely, and he’s a wife guy. Oh, awks.
After years being one-half of a steadfast Australian couple, and all those public declarations of love for Deborra-Lee Furness, the pair announced their separation in 2023.
Not long before, Jackman had wrapped up a run on Broadway in the show The Music Man. A year after his separation from Furness, his stage co-star, Sutton Foster, filed for divorce from her husband.
The already whispered rumours reached fever pitch, and paparazzi were constantly trying to catch the former stage buddies together.
In May this year, Furness officially filed for divorce and the same week, she released a fiery statement that left little doubt her side of the story. She wrote, “my heart and compassion goes out to anyone who has traversed the traumatic journey of betrayal. It is a profound wound that cuts deep”.
On that same day, Jackman posted a video of himself doing a skip rope routine, scored to NSYNC’s Bye, Bye, Bye, with the caption “FINALLY”.
Taken in isolation, that video was him celebrating nailing a difficult part of his Hugh Jackman: From New York With Love stage show. In the context of his estranged wife’s statement, again, on the same day, it looked like trolling.
Of course he’s entitled to move on and be happy, and it’s been over two years since the separation, but swanning around at award shows and on red carpets with your new girlfriend not long after your ex-wife publicly accused you of “betrayal” is not a good look.
Marriages break down for many reasons and is usually more complex than one thing, but for someone who built a reputation as a nice man, and whose fandom consists of women who held him up as “one of the good ones”, there was just something off about it.
