This Year's Biggest Blockbusters Instructed Us to Take Down the Elite Yet Again. We Yet Aren't Listening.
A familiar idea courses through many of 2025's popular films. This concept that goes all the way back to the time of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the antagonist is a greedy, heartless billionaire wielding his immense fortune to smear Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a rich pharma-bro spending vast sums to throw the heroes into a dinosaur-packed arena for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and framed her for murder, purely for their financial benefit.
A Tradition of Film Wealth Disparity
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin embodies a rich antagonist running a TV network that makes millions by preying upon and eliminating people enduring extreme hardship, while leveraging AI forgeries and a powerful media apparatus to label them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about wealth disparity quite that directly, but its evil characters live in conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them into unemployment and into cages or slavery. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing movie, sets the tough people of a struggling farm town against haughty aristocrats who dwell in extravagant sky-high mansions floating overhead. Remarkably, the lighthearted farcical update *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's scheme to trigger global armageddon — for financial gain, of course.
There is little particularly surprising in a series of movies assuming as fact that rich people have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a endless, demanding appetite for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept stretches back to the birth of movies, with Chaplin’s silent movies setting his chronically destitute iconic vagrant against tycoons, industrialists, and inept, drunken millionaires. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that revised the exact same bit for the era of the rapacious, destructive entrepreneurial bad guy, the complete chronicle of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is at odds with basic human values, and exalt the overthrowing, downfall, and sometimes demise of elite figures.
The Catharsis That Changes Nothing
However, inexplicably, we consistently fail to eating the rich. Whenever elected officials respond to a tragic gun violence event by blaming graphic media, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that easily influenced — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the public consciousness — surely American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. And yet the headlines reveals regularly that a alarming number of Americans instinctively associate wealth with intelligence and value to society, even after decades of history's most popular movies communicating the opposite.
Actually, it looks as though the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a relief valve that hinders meaningful change. Provided with a steady diet of mostly happily-ever-after tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can walk away satisfied about justice being served. These movies are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that the system works, and that determined protagonists will identify any bad apples among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up on their own merit.
A Sharper Message in 2025
But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that regard, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, more pointed, more specific, and seemingly more lethal. It is seldom sufficient in the current era to see rich people gain some humility in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel wealthy people were eliminated by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face point blank on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a wine opener (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs conclusion, likely due to it’s become so obvious that affluent individuals operate under different standards, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."
The "behind bars" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in particularly horrific, fitting ways.
Notable Exclusions
Some films diverge, of course. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up confined to the computer world, where he’s clearly being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is reformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
