This Year's Most Popular Blockbusters Told Us to Take Down the Elite Again. We Yet Aren't Listening.
A familiar motif courses through many of 2025's genre movies. This concept which extends all the way back to the time of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire exploiting his vast wealth to defame Earth's mightiest protector while controlling world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing a fortune to throw the heroes into a prehistoric death trap for personal amusement. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a clan of ultra-rich lynxes who stole a well-meaning mother's altruistic invention and set her up for murder, solely for their dynasty's gain.
A Tradition of On-Screen Wealth Disparity
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a affluent bad guy controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people living in extreme hardship, while leveraging AI forgeries and a powerful media apparatus to label them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about economic inequality as overtly, but its villains enjoy 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 film, sets the scrappy inhabitants of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who dwell in extravagant gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to bring about global armageddon — for his own profit, naturally.
There is little inherently notable in a string of movies taking it as a given that the wealthy have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a insatiable, privileged desire for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and everyday folks are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the birth of movies, with early comedies contrasting his perpetually impoverished Little Tramp character against corporate bosses, bosses, 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 revised that very premise for the era of the rapacious, destructive Silicon Valley antagonist, the entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is at odds with basic human values, and exalt the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes demise of powerful, wealthy people.
The Release That Alters Little
And yet, inexplicably, we never get around to consuming the elite. Whenever elected officials react to a public shooting event by blaming popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that susceptible — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the societal mindset — surely American society would not persistently revere billionaires. And yet the news makes it obvious constantly that a alarming number of Americans innately associate wealth with smartness and importance, even after one hundred years of history's most popular movies conveying the reverse.
In fact, it seems like the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that gets in the way of real-world action. Offered a regular dose of predominantly happily-ever-after stories where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can finish the film feeling good about justice being served. These stories are like moral fairy tales, implying that institutions function, and that determined protagonists will root out any bad apples among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
A Sharper Message in 2025
Even though 2025's movies aren’t new in that regard, they indeed follow some modern developments among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more furious, more incisive, more specific, and apparently more fatal. It’s rarely enough in the current era to see rich people learn a useful lesson in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel rich individuals were slaughtered by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down point blank on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the driven away in cuffs conclusion, possibly since it’s become so clear that affluent individuals operate under a separate justice system, and are very likely to negotiate their release."
The "off to face justice" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.
Key Outliers
There are exceptions, undoubtedly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself confined to the computer world, a setup that obviously being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is reformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
