The Year's Top-Grossing Movies Told Us to Take Down the Elite Again. We Continue to Ignore the Message.
A recurring idea runs through many of 2025's genre movies. It's an idea that stretches all the way back to the days of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire wielding his immense fortune to tarnish Earth's superhero icon while manipulating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a privileged biotech mogul squandering a fortune to throw the heroes into a prehistoric arena to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who pilfered a well-meaning mother's beneficial creation and set her up for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Lineage of Film Elite Villainy
In *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate embodies a affluent bad guy controlling a TV network that makes millions by preying upon and eliminating people enduring abject destitution, while leveraging AI forgeries and a well-honed smear campaign to label them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn’t emphasize class division as overtly, but its evil characters live in obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, driving them into unemployment and into bondage. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top film, sets the scrappy inhabitants of a impoverished farm town against haughty aristocrats who live in opulent sky-high mansions floating overhead. Even, the lighthearted humorous remake *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's scheme to cause planetary doom — to make money, needless to say.
It is not inherently notable in a run of movies presupposing that rich people have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a endless, demanding desire for increased fortune. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a concept stretches back to the early days of film, with the Little Tramp's adventures setting his perpetually impoverished Little Tramp character against fat cats, industrialists, and inept, drunken millionaires. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed a similar story for the era of the exploitative, damaging Silicon Valley antagonist, the whole legacy of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that wealth is incompatible with core morality, and applaud the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes demise of powerful, wealthy people.
The Catharsis That Changes Nothing
And yet, somehow, we never actually eating the rich. Every time politicians respond to a new mass shooting event by blaming violent video games, I sigh with frustration, because if people really were that impressionable — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the collective psyche — certainly American society would not persistently worship billionaires. But the headlines makes it obvious every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans instinctively associate wealth with smartness and importance, even after decades of history's most popular movies conveying the reverse.
If anything, it appears that the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has provided us with a relief valve that gets in the way of real-world action. Offered a regular dose of mostly triumphant stories where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater feeling good about justice being served. These films are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that society is just, and that determined protagonists will weed out any malicious actors among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.
A More Pointed Edge in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that regard, they certainly adhere to some contemporary patterns among class warfare stories: They’re getting angrier, more incisive, more targeted, and observably more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory these days to see rich people be taught a lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful wealthy people were killed by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face directly on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, perhaps because it’s become so clear that affluent individuals operate under different standards, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."
The "behind bars" resolution no longer satisfies anymore. Instead, these villains are apt to perish at the end of their movies, often in particularly horrific, fitting ways.
Significant Exclusions
A few stories differ, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up exiled to the virtual grid, teasing that he is being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is redeemed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
