This Year's Biggest Films Told Us to Take Down the Elite Again. We Continue to Refuse to Listen.
A recurring theme permeates numerous 2025's genre movies. This concept that stretches all the way back to the era of the Little Tramp. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire wielding his vast wealth to defame Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a privileged biotech mogul investing a fortune to throw the heroes into a monster-filled death trap for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and framed her for murder, purely for their dynasty's gain.
A Lineage of On-Screen Elite Villainy
In the remake of *The Running Man*, the antagonist embodies a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that profits hugely by exploiting and murdering people enduring desperate poverty, while employing AI forgeries and a well-honed media apparatus to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn’t emphasize economic inequality as overtly, but its evil characters reside in clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, sets the scrappy people of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who live in opulent gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Remarkably, the zany humorous remake *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plan to trigger worldwide catastrophe — to make money, naturally.
There’s nothing inherently notable in a string of movies assuming as fact that the wealthy have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a endless, demanding desire for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept stretches back to the birth of movies, with the Little Tramp's adventures contrasting his perpetually impoverished Little Tramp character against corporate bosses, authority figures, and clueless rich men. From the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that revised 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 riches is at odds with core morality, and applaud the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes demise of elite figures.
The Release That Alters Little
And yet, inexplicably, we never actually taking down the wealthy. Whenever elected officials respond to a tragic gun violence event by faulting graphic media, I roll my eyes, because if people really were that susceptible — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — surely American society would not persistently worship billionaires. Still the headlines makes it obvious every single day that a significant portion of Americans subconsciously link affluence to intelligence and value to society, even after a century of the world's most beloved movies communicating the reverse.
Actually, it seems like the endless parade of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that gets in the way of real-world action. Offered a regular dose of largely uplifting stories where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can finish the film feeling good about right prevailing. These stories are like cautionary fables, suggesting that institutions function, and that determined protagonists will identify any bad apples among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded through sheer effort.
A Sharper Edge in 2025
Even though 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they do follow some recent trends among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more enraged, more pointed, more direct, and apparently more lethal. It is seldom sufficient these days to see rich people learn a useful lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel rich individuals were killed by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face point blank on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the hauled off to jail conclusion, likely due to it’s become so clear that rich people operate under a separate justice system, and are very likely to buy their way out."
The "behind bars" ending fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to die at the final act of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways.
Key Outliers
A few stories differ, undoubtedly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself exiled to the virtual grid, teasing that he is being saved for possible sequels. 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 unmasked as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
