2025's Biggest Films Instructed Us to Consume the Wealthy Once More. We Yet Aren't Listening.

A familiar idea runs through a host of 2025's genre movies. This notion that stretches all the way back to the era of the Little Tramp. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire wielding his immense fortune to defame Earth's mightiest protector while manipulating world events for his own profit. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro squandering vast sums to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed danger zone for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a dynasty of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and set her up for murder, purely for their dynasty's gain.

A Legacy of Film Class Warfare

In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin embodies a wealthy villain running a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people enduring desperate poverty, while employing AI forgeries and a sophisticated smear campaign to label them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about economic inequality in such a blunt manner, but its antagonists enjoy clear extravagance while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, driving them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top film, contrasts the scrappy inhabitants of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who dwell in extravagant gleaming towers above the clouds. Remarkably, the zany comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plan to cause planetary doom — for financial gain, of course.

There is little especially new in a run of movies assuming as fact that the affluent have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a endless, demanding desire for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and everyday folks are heroes" as a theme goes back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies pitting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against fat cats, industrialists, and bumbling wealthy fools. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that revised the exact same bit for the era of the rapacious, destructive Silicon Valley antagonist, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that wealth is incompatible with fundamental decency, and celebrate the overthrowing, defeat, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.

The Catharsis That Alters Little

Nevertheless, inexplicably, we never actually consuming the elite. Whenever lawmakers react to a public shooting event by pointing fingers at graphic media, I feel exasperated, because if people truly were that susceptible — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the public consciousness — surely American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. But the headlines makes it obvious regularly that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously link affluence to competence and value to society, even after a century of the world's most beloved movies conveying the opposite.

In fact, it appears that the never-ending cycle of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that hinders substantive reform. Given a steady diet of largely uplifting fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater feeling good about right prevailing. These films are like cautionary fables, implying that the system works, and that determined protagonists will root out any bad apples among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.

An Angrier Tone in 2025

But while 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they certainly adhere to some recent trends among class warfare stories: They’re getting more furious, sharper, more specific, and seemingly more lethal. It’s rarely enough in the current era to see rich people gain some humility in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful rich individuals were eliminated by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face point blank on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a wine opener (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).

"Almost none of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the hauled off to jail finale, possibly since it’s become so clear that affluent individuals live by a separate justice system, and are very likely to buy their way out."

The "off to face justice" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Conversely, these villains are likely to die at the end of their movies, often in especially horrific, fitting ways.

Notable Exceptions

Some films diverge, undoubtedly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the computer world, a setup that obviously being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is transformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid