The Year's Biggest Movies Told Us to Consume the Wealthy Yet Again. We Yet Ignore the Message.
A recurring motif courses through many of 2025's genre movies. This notion that goes back in time to the era of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire using his enormous resources to defame Earth's mightiest protector while manipulating world events for his own profit. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the villain is a privileged biotech mogul squandering vast sums to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed death trap for his own profit. In *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and framed her for murder, purely for their financial benefit.
A Tradition of Cinematic Class Warfare
In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a wealthy villain running a TV network that profits hugely by preying upon and eliminating people enduring desperate poverty, while employing deepfakes and a sophisticated propaganda machine to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight class division quite that directly, but its antagonists enjoy obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, pushing them from their homes and into bondage. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, pits the tough residents of a struggling farm town against condescending upper classes who live in extravagant sky-high mansions in the sky. Even, the zany comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to trigger planetary doom — for financial gain, naturally.
There’s nothing especially new in a run of movies assuming as fact that rich people have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a endless, demanding hunger for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a concept dates back to the dawn of cinema, with Chaplin’s silent movies contrasting his always poor beloved underdog against tycoons, bosses, and bumbling wealthy fools. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed that very premise for the era of the rapacious, destructive tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is incompatible with basic human values, and celebrate the neutralizing, defeat, and sometimes demise of the rich and powerful.
The Catharsis That Changes Nothing
And yet, inexplicably, we consistently fail to eating the rich. Whenever politicians follow a public shooting event by blaming popular entertainment, I sigh with frustration, because if people actually were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the collective psyche — surely American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. But the news demonstrates every single day that a alarming number of Americans innately link affluence to intelligence and importance, even after one hundred years of history's most popular movies conveying a contradictory message.
Actually, it appears that the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has given us a relief valve that gets in the way of substantive reform. Given a regular dose of mostly happily-ever-after stories where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can leave the theater content about justice being served. These films are like cautionary fables, pretending that the system works, and that plucky heroes will root out any malicious actors among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded on their own merit.
A Sharper Tone in 2025
Although 2025's movies do not break new ground in that regard, they do follow some recent trends among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more furious, more pointed, more direct, and observably more violent. It is no longer satisfactory in the current era to see rich people be taught a lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful affluent villains were slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down at close range on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, likely due to it’s become so clear that rich people live by their own legal rules, and are very likely to purchase their freedom."
The "behind bars" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to meet their end at the final act of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.
Key Exceptions
Some films diverge, certainly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the virtual grid, teasing that he is being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is redeemed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
