This Year's Biggest Films Told Us to Consume the Wealthy Again. We Still Ignore the Message.

A familiar motif runs through many of 2025's genre movies. This notion which extends all the way back to the era of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the antagonist is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire using his vast wealth to tarnish Earth's superhero icon while orchestrating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir spending tens of millions to cast the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone for personal amusement. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and set her up for murder, solely for their own profit.

A Lineage of On-Screen Wealth Disparity

In the remake of *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate embodies a wealthy villain running a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people living in extreme hardship, while employing AI forgeries and a sophisticated propaganda machine to depict them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about wealth disparity as overtly, but its villains reside in clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one film, sets the scrappy inhabitants of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who dwell in lavish gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Remarkably, the lighthearted humorous remake *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's scheme to cause planetary doom — to make money, needless to say.

There is little particularly surprising in a series of movies presupposing that the affluent have disproportionate control, no morals or empathy, and a endless, demanding desire for increased fortune. "Elites are the bad guys and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies setting his chronically destitute beloved underdog against tycoons, authority figures, and clueless rich men. 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 greedy, harmful Silicon Valley antagonist, the entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is incompatible with basic human values, and celebrate the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes destruction of elite figures.

The Outlet That Fails to Transform

However, somehow, we never get around to taking down the wealthy. Whenever elected officials respond to a tragic gun violence event by pointing fingers at graphic media, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that impressionable — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the collective psyche — certainly American society would not persistently revere billionaires. And yet the headlines makes it obvious regularly that a significant portion of Americans subconsciously link affluence to intelligence and importance, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies conveying a contradictory message.

In fact, it appears that the endless parade of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that gets in the way of substantive reform. Given a steady diet of largely triumphant stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can walk away content about right prevailing. These movies are like cautionary fables, suggesting that institutions function, and that plucky heroes will identify any malicious actors among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up on their own merit.

A More Pointed Tone in 2025

Although 2025's movies aren’t new in that sense, they do follow some contemporary patterns among class warfare stories: They’re getting more enraged, more pointed, more specific, and seemingly more fatal. It’s rarely enough in the current era 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 subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious rich individuals were eliminated by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed point blank on national television (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).

"Almost none of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the driven away in cuffs conclusion, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that affluent individuals function with different standards, and are very likely to negotiate their release."

The "arrested and awaiting trial" outcome isn’t cathartic anymore. Instead, these villains are apt to meet their end at the conclusion of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.

Significant Exclusions

There are exceptions, of course. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up confined to the virtual grid, a setup that obviously being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is redeemed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid