This Year's Biggest Blockbusters Urged Us to Take Down the Elite Yet Again. We Continue to Refuse to Listen.

A recurring idea permeates many of 2025's genre movies. This notion which extends back in time to the days of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire using his immense fortune to smear Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events for his own profit. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the villain is a rich pharma-bro spending vast sums to throw the heroes into a dinosaur-packed arena for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who stole a well-meaning mother's life-changing idea and set her up for murder, solely for their own profit.

A Lineage of Cinematic Wealth Disparity

Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate portrays a wealthy villain operating 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 depict them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about class division as overtly, but its villains enjoy obvious luxury while preying upon and oppressing Oz's poorest citizens, forcing them out of jobs and into bondage. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top film, contrasts the tough residents of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who live in lavish sky-high mansions in the sky. Remarkably, the zany humorous remake *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plan to cause planetary doom — for his own profit, naturally.

It is not inherently notable in a series of movies assuming as fact that the affluent have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a insatiable, privileged desire for greater riches. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the early days of film, with Chaplin’s silent movies pitting his always poor beloved underdog against tycoons, industrialists, and inept, drunken millionaires. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that updated the exact same bit for the era of the rapacious, destructive entrepreneurial bad guy, the complete chronicle of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that wealth is at odds with basic human values, and exalt the overthrowing, defeat, and sometimes demise of powerful, wealthy people.

The Catharsis That Fails to Transform

Nevertheless, somehow, we consistently fail to taking down the wealthy. Whenever politicians respond to a public shooting event by pointing fingers at violent video games, I sigh with frustration, because if people truly were that easily influenced — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — surely American society wouldn’t still idolize billionaires. And yet the news reveals every single day that a significant portion of Americans innately equate riches with smartness and social worth, even after decades of history's most popular movies conveying a contradictory message.

Actually, it looks as though the endless parade of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that hinders substantive reform. Offered a frequent serving of predominantly uplifting stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can walk away satisfied about good conquering evil. These films are like ethical parables, pretending that society is just, and that resourceful individuals will weed out any malicious actors among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded on their own merit.

A Sharper Tone in 2025

Even though 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they certainly adhere to some recent trends among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, more incisive, more targeted, and observably more lethal. It is no longer satisfactory nowadays 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 exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful rich individuals were slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an rising rival (*Him*).

"Hardly any of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the hauled off to jail conclusion, likely due to it’s become so obvious that the wealthy function with different standards, and are very likely to buy their way out."

The "off to face justice" resolution isn’t cathartic anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in notably grotesque, ironic ways.

Key Exceptions

Some films diverge, of course. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up exiled to the virtual grid, where he’s clearly being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is transformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid