The Year's Most Popular Movies Urged Us to Consume the Wealthy Yet Again. We Yet Aren't Listening.
A familiar idea runs through many of 2025's blockbuster hits. It's an idea which extends far back to the time of the Little Tramp. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire wielding his immense fortune to smear Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a privileged biotech mogul squandering a fortune to trap the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone to boost his wealth. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who pilfered a well-meaning mother's beneficial creation and framed her for murder, all for their own profit.
A Lineage of Cinematic Class Warfare
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin embodies a rich antagonist running a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people suffering through desperate poverty, while leveraging AI forgeries and a powerful smear campaign to label them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize class division quite that directly, but its antagonists reside in obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, pushing them from their homes and into bondage. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, contrasts the resourceful residents of a struggling farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit extravagant gleaming towers floating overhead. Even, the zany comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's scheme to trigger global armageddon — for his own profit, of course.
There is little particularly surprising in a run of movies presupposing that the affluent have disproportionate control, lack ethics or compassion, and a insatiable, privileged appetite for greater riches. "Elites are the bad guys and plucky heroes are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the early days of film, with the Little Tramp's adventures setting his always poor beloved underdog against fat cats, bosses, and clueless rich men. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed the exact same bit for the era of the exploitative, damaging Silicon Valley antagonist, the complete chronicle of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that riches is contrary to fundamental decency, and applaud the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes demise of powerful, wealthy people.
The Outlet That Alters Little
Nevertheless, somehow, we consistently fail to taking down the wealthy. Whenever elected officials follow a tragic gun violence event by blaming graphic media, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that impressionable — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the collective psyche — surely American society would not persistently worship billionaires. And yet the news reveals regularly that a alarming number of Americans innately equate riches with competence and importance, even after one hundred years of history's most popular movies promoting the opposite.
Actually, it appears that the constant stream of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has given us a safety outlet that hinders substantive reform. Given a steady diet of mostly happily-ever-after stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can leave the theater content about good conquering evil. These stories are like cautionary fables, implying that society is just, and that determined protagonists will identify any corrupt individuals among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves on their own merit.
An Angrier Tone in 2025
Although 2025's movies are not novel in that regard, they indeed follow some recent trends among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more specific, and seemingly more lethal. It is seldom sufficient nowadays to see rich people be taught a lesson in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth 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 consumed by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the packed into a police car conclusion, possibly since it’s become so clear that the wealthy live by their own legal rules, and are highly probable to buy their way out."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" resolution isn’t cathartic anymore. Conversely, these villains are prone to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Exceptions
A few stories differ, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself confined to the computer world, where he’s clearly 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 culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
