The Year's Top-Grossing Blockbusters Urged Us to Take Down the Elite Yet Again. We Continue to Refuse to Listen.
A recurring theme courses through many of 2025's genre movies. This notion which extends all the way back to the days of silent film comedy. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir squandering tens of millions to throw the heroes into a monster-filled arena for personal amusement. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a family of extremely affluent lynxes who stole a well-meaning mother's altruistic invention and set her up for murder, all for their financial benefit.
A Tradition of Film Wealth Disparity
In the remake of *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin embodies a affluent bad guy operating a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people living in desperate poverty, while leveraging AI forgeries and a powerful smear campaign to label them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about class division as overtly, but its antagonists enjoy obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top film, sets the resourceful people of a impoverished farm town against haughty aristocrats who dwell in opulent gleaming towers floating overhead. Remarkably, the zany humorous remake *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's scheme to cause global armageddon — for financial gain, needless to say.
It is not inherently notable in a string of movies presupposing that the wealthy have excessive influence, are devoid of conscience, and a bottomless, entitled desire for more wealth. "Elites are the bad guys and plucky heroes are heroes" as a theme goes back to the birth of movies, with early comedies contrasting his chronically destitute iconic vagrant against tycoons, industrialists, and clueless rich men. Beginning 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 rapacious, destructive Silicon Valley antagonist, the complete chronicle of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is contrary to basic human values, and exalt the defusing, defeat, and sometimes demise of the rich and powerful.
The Outlet That Alters Little
Nevertheless, inexplicably, we consistently fail to consuming the elite. On each occasion politicians react to a public shooting event by pointing fingers at graphic media, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that susceptible — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the collective psyche — undoubtedly American society would not continue to revere billionaires. And yet the daily reports demonstrates constantly that a frightening percentage of Americans subconsciously equate riches with smartness and social worth, even after a century of history's most popular movies promoting a contradictory message.
Actually, it appears that the never-ending cycle of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has given us a relief valve that gets in the way of substantive reform. Offered a regular dose of predominantly happily-ever-after stories where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away feeling good about right prevailing. These stories are like ethical parables, suggesting that institutions function, and that resourceful individuals will root out any bad apples among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded on their own merit.
A Sharper Tone in 2025
Although 2025's movies aren’t new in that regard, they indeed follow some recent trends among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more targeted, and seemingly more violent. It’s rarely enough in the current era to see rich people be taught a lesson in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious wealthy people were slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a wine opener (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail ending, likely due to it’s become so obvious that the wealthy live by a separate justice system, and are very likely to buy their way out."
The "off to face justice" outcome fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are apt to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways.
Key Outliers
A few stories differ, undoubtedly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself confined to the computer world, where he’s clearly being saved for future installments. 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 frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
