The Year's Biggest Films Urged Us to Consume the Wealthy Yet Again. We Continue to Ignore the Message.
A familiar idea runs through a host of 2025's genre movies. This notion which extends far back to the days of the Little Tramp. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his vast wealth to defame Earth's superhero icon while manipulating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a rich pharma-bro investing a fortune to cast the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a well-meaning mother's altruistic invention and set her up for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Tradition of Film Elite Villainy
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate embodies a affluent bad guy controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people suffering through extreme hardship, while using digital impersonations and a well-honed media apparatus to label them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight wealth disparity in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters live in conspicuous opulence while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, pushing them into unemployment and into bondage. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one movie, pits the scrappy people of a impoverished farm town against condescending upper classes who dwell in opulent sky-high mansions floating overhead. Interestingly, the lighthearted farcical update of *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's scheme to cause planetary doom — to make money, of course.
There is little especially new in a series of movies presupposing that the affluent have excessive influence, are devoid of conscience, and a bottomless, entitled desire for more wealth. "Elites are the bad guys and plucky heroes are heroes" as a plot device dates back to the birth of movies, with Chaplin’s silent movies setting his always poor Little Tramp character against tycoons, authority figures, and clueless rich men. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that revised 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 take it for granted that wealth is incompatible with fundamental decency, and exalt the neutralizing, downfall, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.
The Outlet That Fails to Transform
And yet, for some reason, we never actually taking down the wealthy. Every time lawmakers respond to a new mass shooting event by blaming violent video games, I sigh with frustration, because if people truly were that susceptible — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the collective psyche — surely American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. But the news demonstrates regularly that a significant portion of Americans subconsciously equate riches with competence and importance, even after a century of history's most popular movies conveying the opposite.
Actually, it appears that the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that gets in the way of real-world action. Provided with a steady diet of predominantly uplifting fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can leave the theater feeling good about justice being served. These films are like moral fairy tales, pretending that society is just, and that plucky heroes will root out any malicious actors among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded on their own merit.
A More Pointed Edge in 2025
Although 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they do follow some modern developments among class warfare stories: They’re getting angrier, sharper, more direct, and seemingly more lethal. It’s rarely enough nowadays to see rich people gain some humility about modesty, 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 eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face directly on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, likely due to it’s become so apparent that affluent individuals operate under different standards, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."
The "behind bars" outcome isn’t cathartic anymore. Conversely, these villains are likely to meet their end at the end of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.
Key Exclusions
Some films diverge, undoubtedly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up confined to the digital realm, a setup that obviously being saved for future installments. 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 culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid