The Year's Top-Grossing Blockbusters Told Us to Take Down the Elite Yet Again. We Yet Aren't Listening.
An age-old idea runs through a host of 2025's genre movies. It's an idea that stretches back in time to the era of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting his vast wealth to smear Earth's superhero icon while orchestrating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro investing a fortune to trap the heroes into a prehistoric death trap for personal amusement. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a dynasty of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and set her up for murder, solely for their own profit.
A Lineage of Cinematic Class Warfare
In *The Running Man*, the antagonist portrays a affluent bad guy operating a TV network that makes millions by preying upon and eliminating people living in abject destitution, while leveraging digital impersonations and a well-honed media apparatus to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about class division as overtly, but its antagonists reside in obvious luxury while preying upon and oppressing Oz's most vulnerable population, pushing them out of jobs and into bondage. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one movie, contrasts the tough inhabitants of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who dwell in opulent sky-high mansions above the clouds. Interestingly, the agreeably goofy comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's scheme to trigger worldwide catastrophe — to make money, naturally.
There’s nothing especially new in a string of movies presupposing that the affluent have excessive influence, lack ethics or compassion, and a endless, demanding appetite for greater riches. "Rich people are villains and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept goes back to the birth of movies, with early comedies contrasting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against corporate bosses, industrialists, and clueless rich men. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed that very premise for the era of the exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the entire history of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that wealth is at odds with core morality, and exalt the defusing, routing, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.
The Catharsis That Changes Nothing
Nevertheless, somehow, we never actually consuming the elite. Every time elected officials react to a tragic gun violence event by pointing fingers at violent video games, I roll my eyes, because if people actually were that impressionable — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the societal mindset — certainly American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. Still the headlines reveals constantly that a significant portion of Americans instinctively link affluence to competence and value to society, even after one hundred years of history's most popular movies conveying a contradictory message.
Actually, it appears that the endless parade of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that gets in the way of real-world action. Provided with a steady diet of predominantly happily-ever-after fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film feeling good about right prevailing. These films are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that society is just, and that determined protagonists will weed out any bad apples among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.
A Sharper Message in 2025
But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they indeed follow some modern developments among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting angrier, more incisive, more targeted, and observably more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory in the current era to see rich people gain some humility about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel affluent villains were eliminated by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down point blank on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a wine opener (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that the wealthy function with a separate justice system, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."
The "off to face justice" resolution isn’t cathartic anymore. Conversely, these villains are likely to perish at the end of their movies, often in especially grotesque, ironic ways.
Significant Exceptions
Some films diverge, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the virtual grid, teasing that he is being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is transformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
