2025's Top-Grossing Films Instructed Us to Take Down the Elite Yet Again. We Still Aren't Listening.
A recurring idea runs through a host of 2025's popular films. This concept which extends all the way back to the time of Charlie Chaplin. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the evil force is a envious, ruthless billionaire wielding his enormous resources to smear Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro spending a fortune to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed danger zone to boost his wealth. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's beneficial creation and framed her for murder, purely for their dynasty's gain.
A Lineage of On-Screen Elite Villainy
In the remake of *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin portrays a rich antagonist operating a TV network that profits hugely by exploiting and murdering people living in extreme hardship, while employing AI forgeries and a well-honed media apparatus to depict them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight economic inequality as overtly, but its evil characters reside in obvious luxury while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, forcing them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing film, sets the scrappy inhabitants of a struggling farm town against condescending upper classes who dwell in opulent gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Even, the zany humorous remake *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's scheme to bring about worldwide catastrophe — to make money, needless to say.
It is not particularly surprising in a run of movies presupposing that the wealthy have disproportionate control, lack ethics or compassion, and a insatiable, privileged desire for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and everyday folks are heroes" as a theme goes back to the dawn of cinema, with the Little Tramp's adventures setting his perpetually impoverished Little Tramp character against corporate bosses, bosses, 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 that very premise for the era of the exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that wealth is incompatible with fundamental decency, and celebrate the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.
The Catharsis That Fails to Transform
And yet, inexplicably, we consistently fail to eating the rich. On each occasion elected officials follow a public shooting event by pointing fingers at violent video games, I sigh with frustration, because if people truly were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the public consciousness — certainly American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. But the daily reports demonstrates constantly that a alarming number of Americans instinctively link affluence to smartness and importance, even after decades of cinema's biggest movies communicating the reverse.
Actually, it appears that the endless parade of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has created a relief valve that gets in the way of substantive reform. Offered a steady diet of largely happily-ever-after tales where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater feeling good about good conquering evil. These movies are like cautionary fables, implying that institutions function, and that resourceful individuals will root out any corrupt individuals among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up on their own merit.
A More Pointed Tone in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that regard, they do follow some contemporary patterns among class warfare stories: They’re getting more enraged, more pointed, more direct, and observably more lethal. It is seldom sufficient nowadays to see rich people learn a useful lesson in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious wealthy people were killed by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down directly on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a wine opener (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the packed into a police car finale, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that rich people function with different standards, and are very likely to purchase their freedom."
The "behind bars" outcome no longer satisfies anymore. Conversely, these villains are prone to meet their end at the conclusion of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Exceptions
There are exceptions, certainly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself confined to the computer world, a setup that obviously being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is reformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
