The Year's Top-Grossing Movies Instructed Us to Take Down the Elite Again. We Still Ignore the Message.
A recurring idea courses through numerous 2025's popular films. It's an idea which extends all the way back to the time of silent film comedy. In the new *Superman* film, the antagonist is a envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting his vast wealth to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a rich pharma-bro squandering vast sums to cast the heroes into a prehistoric death trap for his own profit. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a dynasty of ultra-rich lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and set her up for murder, all for their own profit.
A Lineage of Cinematic Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate embodies a affluent bad guy running a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people enduring abject destitution, while leveraging digital impersonations and a well-honed media apparatus to portray them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about wealth disparity in such a blunt manner, but its villains enjoy clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one film, contrasts the resourceful residents of a impoverished farm town against condescending upper classes who live in extravagant gleaming towers above the clouds. Remarkably, the lighthearted comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to bring about global armageddon — to make money, naturally.
There is little particularly surprising in a run of movies taking it as a given that the affluent have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled desire for greater riches. "Elites are the bad guys and plucky heroes are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the early days of film, with early comedies pitting his perpetually impoverished Little Tramp character against corporate bosses, bosses, and inept, drunken millionaires. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that updated a similar story for the era of the rapacious, destructive Silicon Valley antagonist, the entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that riches is contrary to basic human values, and celebrate the defusing, defeat, and sometimes demise of the rich and powerful.
The Catharsis That Alters Little
Nevertheless, somehow, we consistently fail to taking down the wealthy. On each occasion elected officials respond to a public shooting event by blaming violent video games, I feel exasperated, because if people truly were that impressionable — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — undoubtedly American society would not continue to revere billionaires. Still the headlines makes it obvious constantly that a alarming number of Americans innately link affluence to smartness and value to society, even after a century of history's most popular movies conveying the opposite.
In fact, it looks as though the never-ending cycle of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that impedes meaningful change. Provided with a frequent serving of largely triumphant tales where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can finish the film feeling good about right prevailing. These films are like cautionary fables, pretending that institutions function, and that determined protagonists will identify any bad apples among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves on their own merit.
A Sharper Message in 2025
Even though 2025's movies do not break new ground in that sense, they indeed follow some modern developments among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more furious, more incisive, more specific, and observably more fatal. It is seldom sufficient nowadays to see rich people learn a useful lesson in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious rich individuals were slaughtered by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down directly on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail ending, perhaps because it’s become so clear that affluent individuals function with a separate justice system, and are very likely to buy their way out."
The "behind bars" ending fails to deliver anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in notably grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Exclusions
Some films diverge, undoubtedly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up confined to the computer world, teasing that he is being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is redeemed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
