This Year's Most Popular Films Told Us to Take Down the Elite Again. We Continue to Ignore the Message.

An age-old theme permeates a host of 2025's genre movies. This concept that goes far back to the era of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire wielding his vast wealth to smear Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events to enrich himself. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the antagonist is a privileged biotech mogul squandering a fortune to throw the heroes into a dinosaur-packed danger zone to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who pilfered a well-meaning mother's beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, solely for their dynasty's gain.

A Legacy of Cinematic Elite Villainy

In the remake of *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate embodies a affluent bad guy operating a TV network that makes millions by exploiting and murdering people suffering through extreme hardship, while employing deepfakes and a sophisticated smear campaign to label them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize economic inequality quite that directly, but its evil characters enjoy clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, driving them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, sets the resourceful inhabitants of a impoverished farm town against haughty aristocrats who dwell in opulent sky-high mansions floating overhead. Even, the lighthearted humorous remake *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's scheme to trigger worldwide catastrophe — for his own profit, needless to say.

There’s nothing particularly surprising in a string of movies assuming as fact that rich people have too much power, lack ethics or compassion, and a bottomless, entitled desire for greater riches. "The wealthy are antagonists and plucky heroes are heroes" as a concept stretches back to the early days of film, with early comedies pitting his chronically destitute Little Tramp character against tycoons, industrialists, and inept, drunken millionaires. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that revised a similar story for the era of the greedy, harmful Silicon Valley antagonist, the whole legacy of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that riches is incompatible with fundamental decency, and exalt the neutralizing, defeat, and sometimes demise of the rich and powerful.

The Release That Fails to Transform

Nevertheless, for some reason, we never get around to taking down the wealthy. Every time lawmakers follow a new mass shooting event by faulting graphic media, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that susceptible — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the societal mindset — surely American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. Still the news makes it obvious regularly that a alarming number of Americans innately link affluence to smartness and social worth, even after decades of history's most popular movies communicating the reverse.

If anything, it appears that the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a safety outlet that gets in the way of meaningful change. Given a regular dose of largely uplifting fables where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can leave the theater satisfied about right prevailing. These films are like moral fairy tales, pretending that society is just, and that determined protagonists will weed out any malicious actors among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up on their own merit.

An Angrier Tone in 2025

Even though 2025's movies do not break new ground in that sense, they certainly adhere to some recent trends among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, sharper, more specific, and seemingly more fatal. It’s rarely enough these days to see rich people gain some humility in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth 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 eaten 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 killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).

"Hardly any of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the hauled off to jail ending, likely due to it’s become so clear that affluent individuals function with their own legal rules, and are very likely to purchase their freedom."

The "off to face justice" resolution isn’t cathartic anymore. Conversely, these villains are prone to meet their end at the end of their movies, often in particularly horrific, fitting ways.

Key Outliers

There are exceptions, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself exiled to the computer world, teasing that he is being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is redeemed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid