The Year's Most Popular Films Told Us to Consume the Wealthy Once More. We Still Ignore the Message.

An age-old theme courses through numerous 2025's popular films. This concept that goes back in time to the time of Charlie Chaplin. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to smear Earth's superhero icon while controlling world events to enrich himself. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro spending vast sums to trap the heroes into a dinosaur-packed danger zone to boost his wealth. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who stole a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and set her up for murder, solely for their own profit.

A Legacy of On-Screen Elite Villainy

In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin embodies a rich antagonist running a TV network that makes millions by taking advantage of and killing people enduring extreme hardship, while employing AI forgeries and a powerful media apparatus to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about wealth disparity as overtly, but its villains enjoy conspicuous opulence while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one film, contrasts the scrappy people of a hardscrabble farm town against condescending upper classes who inhabit extravagant gleaming towers in the sky. Even, the zany humorous remake *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plan to bring about global armageddon — to make money, naturally.

There is little particularly surprising in a run of movies taking it as a given that the wealthy have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for greater riches. "The wealthy are antagonists and plucky heroes are heroes" as a plot device dates back to the early days of film, with the Little Tramp's adventures pitting his chronically destitute iconic vagrant against fat cats, authority figures, and inept, drunken millionaires. Beginning 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 exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is incompatible with core morality, and applaud the neutralizing, downfall, and sometimes destruction of elite figures.

The Outlet That Fails to Transform

Nevertheless, inexplicably, we never actually taking down the wealthy. Every time lawmakers respond to a public shooting event by blaming popular entertainment, I sigh with frustration, because if people really were that susceptible — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the collective psyche — surely American society wouldn’t still idolize billionaires. And yet the headlines demonstrates regularly that a significant portion of Americans innately link affluence to smartness and social worth, even after a century of history's most popular movies communicating a contradictory message.

Actually, it appears that the never-ending cycle of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has provided us with a pressure release that impedes substantive reform. Given a frequent serving of mostly happily-ever-after fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away content about right prevailing. These stories are like cautionary fables, implying that society is just, and that resourceful individuals will weed out any malicious actors among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.

A Sharper Message in 2025

Although 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they indeed follow some recent trends among class warfare stories: They’re getting angrier, sharper, more specific, and apparently more violent. It’s rarely enough these days to see rich people learn a useful lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel affluent villains were killed by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and executed directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).

"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs conclusion, perhaps because it’s become so apparent that rich people operate under their own legal rules, and are all too likely to buy their way out."

The "arrested and awaiting trial" resolution no longer satisfies anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to die at the final act of their movies, often in especially brutal, poetic ways.

Key Exceptions

There are exceptions, undoubtedly. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the virtual grid, a setup that obviously being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is redeemed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid