The Year's Biggest Films Urged Us to Consume the Wealthy Yet Again. We Still Ignore the Message.

A recurring idea runs through many of 2025's blockbuster hits. This notion that stretches back in time to the time of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the evil force is a envious, ruthless billionaire using his vast wealth to defame Earth's mightiest protector while orchestrating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir spending tens of millions to throw the heroes into a prehistoric arena for his own profit. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a clan of ultra-rich lynxes who pilfered a well-meaning mother's life-changing idea and pinned the blame on her for murder, all for their financial benefit.

A Lineage of Film Class Warfare

In *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate portrays a affluent bad guy running a TV network that profits hugely by preying upon and eliminating people suffering through extreme hardship, while leveraging digital impersonations and a well-honed smear campaign to label them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn’t emphasize class division in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters enjoy conspicuous opulence while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, pushing them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing film, sets the scrappy people of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit extravagant sky-high mansions floating overhead. Remarkably, the zany comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to bring about worldwide catastrophe — for his own profit, needless to say.

There is little inherently notable in a run of movies presupposing that rich people have disproportionate control, no morals or empathy, and a endless, demanding appetite for increased fortune. "The wealthy are antagonists and plucky heroes are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the birth of movies, with the Little Tramp's adventures pitting his chronically destitute iconic vagrant against corporate bosses, industrialists, and bumbling wealthy fools. From 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 exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that wealth is contrary to fundamental decency, and exalt the defusing, routing, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.

The Outlet That Fails to Transform

And yet, for some reason, we never get around to taking down the wealthy. Every time lawmakers follow a public shooting event by faulting violent video games, I feel exasperated, because if people truly were that susceptible — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — surely American society would not continue to revere billionaires. But the daily reports makes it obvious constantly that a alarming number of Americans instinctively associate wealth with smartness and value to society, even after a century of cinema's biggest movies communicating the reverse.

If anything, it looks as though the endless parade of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has given us a safety outlet that impedes meaningful change. Offered a steady diet of predominantly triumphant tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can walk away content about good conquering evil. These stories are like ethical parables, suggesting that the system works, and that determined protagonists will identify any bad apples among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves through sheer effort.

A Sharper Tone in 2025

Although 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they indeed follow some modern developments among class warfare stories: They’re getting angrier, more incisive, more direct, and seemingly more fatal. It is seldom sufficient these days to see rich people gain some humility in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel affluent villains were eliminated by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed directly on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a wine opener (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).

"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs finale, possibly since it’s become so obvious that rich people function with their own legal rules, and are very likely to purchase their freedom."

The "off to face justice" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in particularly horrific, fitting ways.

Notable Outliers

A few stories differ, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself exiled to the digital realm, 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 redeemed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid