The Year's Biggest Movies Told Us to Consume the Wealthy Again. We Continue to Aren't Listening.
An age-old theme runs through a host of 2025's genre movies. This concept that goes all the way back to the days of silent film comedy. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire using his vast wealth to defame Earth's mightiest protector while controlling world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir spending a fortune to cast the heroes into a prehistoric arena for personal amusement. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a dynasty of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's altruistic invention and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their financial benefit.
A Lineage of On-Screen Wealth Disparity
In the remake of *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a wealthy villain operating a TV network that profits hugely by taking advantage of and killing people suffering through desperate poverty, while employing AI forgeries and a well-honed media apparatus to portray them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight class division as overtly, but its antagonists reside in clear extravagance while preying upon and oppressing Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them out of jobs and into bondage. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top film, contrasts the scrappy residents of a struggling farm town against condescending upper classes who inhabit extravagant gleaming towers in the sky. Interestingly, the agreeably goofy farcical update of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to cause global armageddon — for financial gain, of course.
There’s nothing especially new in a string of movies assuming as fact that the wealthy have disproportionate control, no morals or empathy, and a endless, demanding hunger for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and plucky heroes are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the birth of movies, with early comedies pitting his chronically destitute iconic vagrant against tycoons, bosses, and clueless rich men. 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 entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that riches is incompatible with core morality, and exalt the neutralizing, defeat, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.
The Release That Alters Little
Nevertheless, inexplicably, we never get around to taking down the wealthy. Every time politicians respond to a tragic gun violence event by faulting violent video games, I sigh with frustration, because if people truly were that susceptible — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — undoubtedly American society would not persistently worship billionaires. But the daily reports makes it obvious every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with intelligence and social worth, even after one hundred years of history's most popular movies promoting the opposite.
Actually, it looks as though the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that hinders real-world action. Provided with a regular dose of largely uplifting tales where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater satisfied about justice being served. These films are like moral fairy tales, implying that society is just, and that resourceful individuals will weed out any corrupt individuals among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.
An Angrier Edge in 2025
Although 2025's movies are not novel in that regard, they certainly adhere to some contemporary patterns among class warfare stories: They’re getting more enraged, sharper, more specific, and apparently more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory in the current era to see rich people gain some humility in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious affluent villains were killed by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a enormous hybrid beast (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down at close range on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, possibly since it’s become so obvious that the wealthy live by a separate justice system, and are very likely to negotiate their release."
The "off to face justice" resolution isn’t cathartic anymore. Conversely, these villains are prone to meet their end at the final act of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways.
Notable Exclusions
Some films diverge, certainly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up banished to the virtual grid, a setup that obviously being saved for a follow-up film. 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 thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid