2025's Biggest Movies Told Us to Take Down the Elite Again. We Still Aren't Listening.
An age-old theme runs through a host of 2025's blockbuster hits. It's an idea that goes far back to the days of silent film comedy. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his immense fortune to defame Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a rich pharma-bro spending tens of millions to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed death trap for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a family of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and pinned the blame on her for murder, all for their own profit.
A Lineage of On-Screen Elite Villainy
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 taking advantage of and killing people suffering through abject destitution, while leveraging deepfakes and a well-honed propaganda machine to label them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight wealth disparity in such a blunt manner, but its villains enjoy conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them out of jobs and into bondage. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, sets the tough residents of a struggling farm town against condescending upper classes who inhabit lavish sky-high mansions floating overhead. Even, the lighthearted comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's scheme to cause planetary doom — for financial gain, of course.
There is little particularly surprising in a run of movies taking it as a given that the affluent have excessive influence, are devoid of conscience, and a insatiable, privileged appetite for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and plucky heroes are heroes" as a concept dates back to the dawn of cinema, with Chaplin’s silent movies pitting his always poor beloved underdog against tycoons, bosses, and inept, drunken millionaires. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that revised that very premise for the era of the rapacious, destructive entrepreneurial bad guy, the entire history of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that wealth is at odds with basic human values, and exalt the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.
The Release That Changes Nothing
And yet, for some reason, we never actually consuming the elite. On each occasion lawmakers react to a tragic gun violence event by faulting popular entertainment, I sigh with frustration, because if people actually were that easily influenced — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the societal mindset — certainly American society would not continue to revere billionaires. Still the daily reports reveals constantly that a alarming number of Americans instinctively equate riches with competence and social worth, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies communicating a contradictory message.
If anything, it seems like the endless parade of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that impedes real-world action. Provided with a regular dose of mostly uplifting fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater feeling good about right prevailing. These films are like cautionary fables, suggesting that society is just, and that resourceful individuals will root out any corrupt individuals among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up on their own merit.
An Angrier Edge in 2025
But while 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, sharper, more targeted, and apparently more lethal. It’s rarely enough in the current era to see rich people learn a useful lesson in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel affluent villains were killed by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that affluent individuals function with a separate justice system, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" ending fails to deliver anymore. Conversely, these villains are likely to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in especially grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Outliers
There are exceptions, undoubtedly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up confined to the computer world, a setup that obviously being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is redeemed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
