This Year's Most Popular Blockbusters Told Us to Take Down the Elite Yet Again. We Still Aren't Listening.
An age-old idea runs through numerous 2025's genre movies. It's an idea that goes back in time to the time of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire using his immense fortune to smear Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events for his own profit. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the villain is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing vast sums to throw the heroes into a dinosaur-packed death trap to boost his wealth. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a dynasty of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and set her up for murder, purely for their dynasty's gain.
A Tradition of Film Wealth Disparity
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin portrays a wealthy villain operating a TV network that profits hugely by exploiting and murdering people suffering through desperate poverty, while using deepfakes and a well-honed smear campaign to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight wealth disparity as overtly, but its villains reside in clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's most vulnerable population, pushing them into unemployment and into bondage. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one box-office hit, contrasts the scrappy people of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who dwell in lavish gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Interestingly, the zany farcical update of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plan to bring about planetary doom — for his own profit, of course.
It is not especially new in a series of movies taking it as a given that rich people have too much power, lack ethics or compassion, and a insatiable, privileged hunger for increased fortune. "The wealthy are antagonists and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept goes back to the birth of movies, with Chaplin’s silent movies setting his always poor beloved underdog against corporate bosses, bosses, and clueless rich men. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that refreshed a similar story for the era of the rapacious, destructive entrepreneurial bad guy, the entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that wealth is incompatible with core morality, and applaud the defusing, downfall, and sometimes demise of the rich and powerful.
The Release That Changes Nothing
However, inexplicably, we never actually taking down the wealthy. Every time politicians respond to a new mass shooting event by pointing fingers at graphic media, I roll my eyes, because if people truly 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 continue to revere billionaires. Still the headlines reveals regularly that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with intelligence and importance, even after decades of history's most popular movies communicating the reverse.
Actually, it appears that the never-ending cycle of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that gets in the way of substantive reform. Provided with a steady diet of mostly triumphant stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater satisfied about right prevailing. These films are like ethical parables, implying that institutions function, and that plucky heroes will root out any corrupt individuals among the generally industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.
A More Pointed Message in 2025
Even though 2025's movies do not break new ground in that regard, they certainly adhere to some modern developments among class warfare stories: They’re getting angrier, more pointed, more direct, and apparently more lethal. It’s rarely enough nowadays to see rich people gain some humility in empathy, 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 mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face point blank on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the hauled off to jail conclusion, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that the wealthy function with their own legal rules, and are all too likely to buy their way out."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" ending isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are prone to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in particularly horrific, fitting ways.
Notable Exclusions
A few stories differ, certainly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself banished 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 antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
