This Year's Most Popular Films Told Us to Take Down the Elite Once More. We Continue to Aren't Listening.

An age-old theme permeates many of 2025's genre movies. It's an idea which extends far back to the time of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the antagonist is a envious, ruthless billionaire wielding his immense fortune to defame Earth's superhero icon while orchestrating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a privileged biotech mogul squandering vast sums to cast the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a dynasty of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's beneficial creation and set her up for murder, solely for their own profit.

A Tradition of Cinematic Elite Villainy

Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin portrays a affluent bad guy controlling a TV network that makes millions by exploiting and murdering people living in desperate poverty, while employing deepfakes and a sophisticated media apparatus to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight economic inequality as overtly, but its villains live in conspicuous opulence while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them into unemployment and into bondage. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one movie, sets the scrappy inhabitants of a hardscrabble farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit extravagant gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Even, the agreeably goofy comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's scheme to cause planetary doom — for his own profit, of course.

It is not especially new in a string of movies taking it as a given that the wealthy 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 plot device dates back to the dawn of cinema, with the Little Tramp's adventures setting his always poor Little Tramp character against tycoons, industrialists, and bumbling wealthy fools. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that updated a similar story for the era of the greedy, harmful entrepreneurial bad guy, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is at odds with core morality, and exalt the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes destruction of powerful, wealthy people.

The Release That Changes Nothing

And yet, somehow, we never actually taking down the wealthy. On each occasion elected officials follow a new mass shooting event by blaming graphic media, I sigh with frustration, because if people actually were that susceptible — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the public consciousness — surely American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. Still the headlines demonstrates constantly that a alarming number of Americans instinctively equate riches with competence and value to society, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies promoting the reverse.

Actually, it appears that the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a relief valve that gets in the way of substantive reform. Given a frequent serving of mostly happily-ever-after stories where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can finish the film satisfied about justice being served. These films are like ethical parables, implying that institutions function, and that determined protagonists will root out any malicious actors among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.

A Sharper Message in 2025

Even though 2025's movies do not break new ground in that sense, they do follow some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting angrier, more pointed, more direct, and apparently more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory 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 eaten by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face directly on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an rising rival (*Him*).

"Almost none of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the hauled off to jail ending, possibly since it’s become so apparent that the wealthy function with different standards, and are very likely to purchase their freedom."

The "off to face justice" outcome fails to deliver anymore. Conversely, these villains are apt to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in especially horrific, fitting ways.

Significant Exceptions

A few stories differ, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up banished to the virtual grid, where he’s clearly being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is reformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid