This Year's Top-Grossing Movies Urged Us to Take Down the Elite Yet Again. We Continue to Aren't Listening.
A recurring motif permeates a host of 2025's blockbuster hits. This notion that goes far back to the era of Charlie Chaplin. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the antagonist is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to smear Earth's mightiest protector while manipulating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir investing a fortune to trap the heroes into a dinosaur-packed arena to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a dynasty of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and framed her for murder, solely for their own profit.
A Lineage of Film Elite Villainy
In the remake of *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin portrays a wealthy villain running a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people enduring extreme hardship, while leveraging AI forgeries and a well-honed propaganda machine to portray them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about wealth disparity in such a blunt manner, but its antagonists reside in clear extravagance while preying upon and oppressing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, forcing them from their homes and into bondage. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one box-office hit, contrasts the scrappy residents of a impoverished farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit lavish gleaming towers in the sky. Remarkably, the zany comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to cause worldwide catastrophe — to make money, needless to say.
It is not inherently notable in a run of movies taking it as a given that the affluent have too much power, lack ethics or compassion, and a endless, demanding appetite for increased fortune. "Elites are the bad guys and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme dates back to the birth of movies, with the Little Tramp's adventures contrasting his always poor iconic vagrant against fat cats, bosses, 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 refreshed a similar story for the era of the greedy, harmful Silicon Valley antagonist, the whole legacy of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that wealth is contrary to core morality, and exalt the overthrowing, downfall, and sometimes destruction of powerful, wealthy people.
The Outlet That Fails to Transform
Nevertheless, for some reason, we never get around to taking down the wealthy. Every time politicians follow a public shooting event by faulting graphic media, I roll my eyes, because if people really were that susceptible — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the collective psyche — certainly American society wouldn’t still idolize billionaires. Still the news reveals regularly that a significant portion of Americans subconsciously link affluence to smartness and social worth, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies promoting the opposite.
In fact, it appears that the constant stream of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has created a safety outlet that gets in the way of real-world action. Provided with a steady diet of predominantly triumphant tales where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can finish the film feeling good about good conquering evil. These movies are like cautionary fables, implying that institutions function, and that determined protagonists will identify any bad apples among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded through sheer effort.
An Angrier Tone in 2025
Although 2025's movies do not break new ground in that regard, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more specific, and apparently more violent. It is seldom sufficient in the current era to see rich people be taught a lesson in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious affluent villains were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed 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 murdered with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the packed into a police car ending, likely due to it’s become so obvious that the wealthy live by a separate justice system, and are all too likely to buy their way out."
The "behind bars" resolution no longer satisfies anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to meet their end at the final act of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.
Notable Outliers
Some films diverge, undoubtedly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up 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 antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
