The Year's Biggest Movies Told Us to Take Down the Elite Yet Again. We Still Ignore the Message.

A recurring theme courses through many of 2025's genre movies. This concept which extends back in time to the days of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to smear Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir squandering a fortune to cast the heroes into a prehistoric death trap for his own profit. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and framed her for murder, all for their financial benefit.

A Legacy of Cinematic Elite Villainy

Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, the antagonist portrays a rich antagonist running a TV network that makes millions by taking advantage of and killing people enduring desperate poverty, while using AI forgeries and a sophisticated smear campaign to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight wealth disparity in such a blunt manner, but its antagonists reside in clear extravagance while preying upon and oppressing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, forcing them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one box-office hit, sets the tough people of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who live in opulent gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Even, the agreeably goofy humorous remake of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to bring about global armageddon — for financial gain, needless to say.

It is not especially new in a string of movies presupposing that the wealthy have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the early days of film, with Chaplin’s silent movies setting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against tycoons, industrialists, and clueless rich men. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that revised the exact same bit for the era of the greedy, harmful entrepreneurial bad guy, the complete chronicle of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that riches is at odds with core morality, and exalt the overthrowing, defeat, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.

The Release That Fails to Transform

Nevertheless, for some reason, we consistently fail to eating the rich. On each occasion elected officials respond to a tragic gun violence event by blaming violent video games, I sigh with frustration, because if people actually were that easily influenced — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the societal mindset — surely American society would not continue to worship billionaires. And yet the headlines demonstrates regularly that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with smartness and importance, even after decades of history's most popular movies communicating the reverse.

In fact, it appears that the endless parade of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has created a relief valve that hinders real-world action. Offered a frequent serving of mostly triumphant fables where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can walk away satisfied about right prevailing. These films are like cautionary fables, pretending that institutions function, and that plucky heroes will root out any corrupt individuals among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.

A Sharper Edge in 2025

Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that regard, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among class warfare stories: They’re getting more enraged, sharper, more specific, and observably more lethal. It is no longer satisfactory nowadays to see rich people be taught a lesson in humility, 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 eliminated by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down at close range on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).

"Very few of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, possibly since it’s become so apparent that the wealthy live by their own legal rules, and are highly probable to purchase their freedom."

The "off to face justice" ending no longer satisfies anymore. Conversely, these villains are apt to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in especially horrific, fitting ways.

Notable Exclusions

A few stories differ, of course. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself confined to the digital realm, where he’s clearly being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is redeemed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid