The Year's Biggest Blockbusters Told Us to Take Down the Elite Once More. We Continue to Refuse to Listen.

A familiar motif permeates a host of 2025's genre movies. It's an idea that stretches far back to the days of silent film comedy. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his vast wealth to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir squandering tens of millions to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed arena to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and framed her for murder, solely for their dynasty's gain.

A Lineage of On-Screen Elite Villainy

Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin embodies a rich antagonist running a TV network that profits hugely by exploiting and murdering people living in desperate poverty, while leveraging deepfakes and a sophisticated media apparatus to label them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn’t emphasize economic inequality in such a blunt manner, but its antagonists live in obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, pushing them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one film, pits the scrappy people of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who live in opulent sky-high mansions above the clouds. Remarkably, the lighthearted humorous remake *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plan to cause planetary doom — to make money, naturally.

There’s nothing especially new in a run of movies presupposing that the wealthy have too much power, are devoid of conscience, and a bottomless, entitled desire for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme dates back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies pitting his perpetually impoverished Little Tramp character against corporate bosses, bosses, and inept, drunken millionaires. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that updated the exact same bit for the era of the rapacious, destructive entrepreneurial bad guy, the complete chronicle of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that wealth is incompatible with core morality, and celebrate the defusing, downfall, and sometimes elimination of powerful, wealthy people.

The Release That Fails to Transform

And yet, inexplicably, we consistently fail to taking down the wealthy. Every time politicians react to a public shooting event by pointing fingers at popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that susceptible — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the societal mindset — certainly American society would not continue to revere billionaires. And yet the news demonstrates every single day that a alarming number of Americans innately associate wealth with smartness and social worth, even after decades of cinema's biggest movies conveying a contradictory message.

In fact, it seems like the never-ending cycle of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that gets in the way of real-world action. Offered a steady diet of mostly uplifting fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film satisfied about justice being served. These stories are like ethical parables, suggesting that institutions function, and that determined protagonists will root out any malicious actors among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up through sheer effort.

A Sharper Edge in 2025

Although 2025's movies aren’t new in that sense, they indeed follow some modern developments among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, sharper, more specific, and apparently more violent. It is seldom sufficient nowadays to see rich people gain some humility about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful affluent villains were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face directly on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).

"Almost none of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the packed into a police car conclusion, possibly since it’s become so obvious that rich people live by their own legal rules, and are all too likely to buy their way out."

The "behind bars" ending no longer satisfies anymore. Rather, these villains are likely to meet their end at the end of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.

Significant Outliers

Some films diverge, undoubtedly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up confined to the digital realm, 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 Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid