The Year's Most Popular Films Told Us to Consume the Wealthy Again. We Still Ignore the Message.
A familiar motif courses through numerous 2025's blockbuster hits. It's an idea which extends far back to the time of Charlie Chaplin. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire wielding his enormous resources to smear Earth's mightiest protector while controlling world events to enrich himself. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the antagonist is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing a fortune to trap the heroes into a prehistoric death trap to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's altruistic invention and set her up for murder, all for their financial benefit.
A Tradition of On-Screen Class Warfare
In *The Running Man*, the antagonist portrays a affluent bad guy running a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people suffering through abject destitution, while employing deepfakes and a sophisticated media apparatus to portray them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn’t emphasize class division as overtly, but its villains live in conspicuous opulence while preying upon and oppressing Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, sets the tough residents of a impoverished farm town against condescending upper classes who live in lavish gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy farcical update *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's scheme to bring about planetary doom — for financial gain, naturally.
There’s nothing particularly surprising in a series of movies presupposing that the wealthy have too much power, are devoid of conscience, and a bottomless, entitled hunger for increased fortune. "Elites are the bad guys and plucky heroes are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with the Little Tramp's adventures pitting his always poor Little Tramp character against tycoons, authority figures, 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 a similar story for the era of the rapacious, destructive entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that wealth is incompatible with fundamental decency, and exalt the defusing, downfall, and sometimes elimination of powerful, wealthy people.
The Release That Alters Little
And yet, somehow, we never get around to consuming the elite. Every time lawmakers follow a tragic gun violence event by pointing fingers at violent video games, I roll my eyes, because if people actually were that easily influenced — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the collective psyche — surely American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. And yet the daily reports makes it obvious constantly that a alarming number of Americans innately associate wealth with smartness and importance, even after decades of cinema's biggest movies communicating the opposite.
Actually, it appears that the endless parade of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has given us a relief valve that gets in the way of meaningful change. Offered a steady diet of predominantly triumphant stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can finish the film feeling good about right prevailing. These stories are like cautionary fables, suggesting that society is just, and that determined protagonists will root out any corrupt individuals among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.
An Angrier Edge in 2025
Although 2025's movies aren’t new in that sense, they certainly adhere to some recent trends among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, more pointed, more targeted, and seemingly more lethal. It’s rarely enough these days to see rich people gain some humility about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious affluent villains were eliminated 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 corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the packed into a police car finale, possibly since it’s become so clear that rich people function with their own legal rules, and are very likely to negotiate their release."
The "behind bars" ending isn’t cathartic anymore. Conversely, these villains are apt to perish at the end of their movies, often in notably horrific, fitting ways.
Key Outliers
Some films diverge, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up confined to the computer world, where he’s clearly being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is reformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid