The Year's Biggest Movies Urged Us to Take Down the Elite Again. We Continue to Refuse to Listen.
A familiar motif courses through a host of 2025's blockbuster hits. It's an idea which extends back in time to the era of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire wielding his vast wealth to smear Earth's superhero icon while controlling world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a rich pharma-bro spending a fortune to trap the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone for his own profit. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a dynasty of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and framed her for murder, solely for their financial benefit.
A Lineage of On-Screen Class Warfare
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, the antagonist portrays a rich antagonist running a TV network that makes millions by exploiting and murdering people living in abject destitution, while employing deepfakes and a sophisticated propaganda machine to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about wealth disparity as overtly, but its antagonists live in obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, forcing them into unemployment and into cages or slavery. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one box-office hit, sets the resourceful inhabitants of a impoverished farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit extravagant sky-high mansions in the sky. Even, the lighthearted comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to bring about worldwide catastrophe — for financial gain, naturally.
It is not especially new in a series of movies assuming as fact that rich people have excessive influence, lack ethics or compassion, and a endless, demanding hunger for greater riches. "Rich people are villains and plucky heroes are heroes" as a plot device dates back to the birth of movies, with early comedies contrasting his perpetually impoverished beloved underdog against tycoons, authority figures, and inept, drunken millionaires. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed a similar story for the era of the exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that riches is contrary to core morality, and exalt the defusing, routing, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.
The Outlet That Alters Little
However, inexplicably, we never get around to consuming the elite. Whenever politicians respond to a new mass shooting event by pointing fingers at graphic media, I sigh with frustration, because if people actually were that easily influenced — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the collective psyche — certainly American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. And yet the news makes it obvious regularly that a significant portion of Americans subconsciously equate riches with intelligence and importance, even after a century of history's most popular movies communicating a contradictory message.
Actually, it seems like the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that gets in the way of substantive reform. Provided with a frequent serving of largely triumphant fables where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can finish the film satisfied about good conquering evil. These stories are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that institutions function, and that resourceful individuals will identify any corrupt individuals among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves on their own merit.
An Angrier Tone in 2025
Although 2025's movies aren’t new in that sense, they indeed follow some recent trends among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, sharper, more direct, and seemingly more lethal. It is no longer satisfactory nowadays to see rich people learn a useful lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious wealthy people were killed by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and executed directly on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail ending, likely due to it’s become so obvious that affluent individuals operate under different standards, and are highly probable to buy their way out."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" outcome isn’t cathartic anymore. Conversely, these villains are apt to die at the final act of their movies, often in especially grotesque, ironic ways.
Notable Outliers
Some films diverge, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up banished to the digital realm, where he’s clearly being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is redeemed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
