2025's Biggest Movies Urged Us to Take Down the Elite Once More. We Continue to Refuse to Listen.

A familiar theme runs through many of 2025's genre movies. It's an idea that goes all the way back to the era of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire wielding his vast wealth to tarnish Earth's mightiest protector while orchestrating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir squandering vast sums to throw the heroes into a monster-filled arena to boost his wealth. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's altruistic invention and set her up for murder, purely for their own profit.

A Lineage of Cinematic Class Warfare

Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin portrays a affluent bad guy controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people enduring extreme hardship, while leveraging AI forgeries and a well-honed media apparatus to portray them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about class division as overtly, but its evil characters enjoy conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing movie, contrasts the tough residents of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who live in lavish gleaming towers floating overhead. Interestingly, the lighthearted farcical update *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plan to trigger planetary doom — for financial gain, needless to say.

It is not especially new in a run of movies presupposing that the affluent have excessive influence, lack ethics or compassion, and a endless, demanding hunger for more wealth. "Elites are the bad guys and plucky heroes are heroes" as a concept stretches back to the early days of film, with early comedies pitting his always poor 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 a similar story for the era of the exploitative, damaging Silicon Valley antagonist, the entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that affluence is at odds with core morality, and applaud the defusing, downfall, and sometimes destruction of elite figures.

The Catharsis That Changes Nothing

Nevertheless, somehow, we never actually consuming the elite. On each occasion politicians respond to a tragic gun violence event by blaming graphic media, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that easily influenced — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the public consciousness — certainly American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. But the headlines demonstrates every single day that a significant portion of Americans innately link affluence to intelligence and value to society, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies promoting a contradictory message.

Actually, it looks as though the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has provided us with a pressure release that hinders meaningful change. Provided with a regular dose of predominantly uplifting tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater satisfied about good conquering evil. These films are like moral fairy tales, implying that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will weed out any corrupt individuals among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded on their own merit.

A More Pointed Message in 2025

But while 2025's movies do not break new ground in that sense, they do follow some modern developments among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, more pointed, more targeted, and observably more violent. It is seldom sufficient nowadays to see rich people be taught a lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious affluent villains were slaughtered by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face at close range on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an rising rival (*Him*).

"Hardly any of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs conclusion, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that the wealthy live by their own legal rules, and are highly probable to purchase their freedom."

The "off to face justice" outcome fails to deliver anymore. Rather, these villains are apt to meet their end at the final act of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.

Notable Exceptions

There are exceptions, undoubtedly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up confined to the virtual grid, teasing that he is being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is transformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid