The Year's Biggest Movies Instructed Us to Consume the Wealthy Again. We Continue to Aren't Listening.
An age-old theme courses through numerous 2025's blockbuster hits. This concept that stretches far back to the era of silent film comedy. In the new *Superman* film, the antagonist is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire using his immense fortune to smear Earth's mightiest protector while controlling world events for his own profit. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the villain is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir spending tens of millions to throw the heroes into a monster-filled death trap for his own profit. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of extremely affluent lynxes who stole a altruistic inventor's altruistic invention and pinned the blame on her for murder, solely for their own profit.
A Tradition of Film Class Warfare
In *The Running Man*, the antagonist plays a wealthy villain running a TV network that profits hugely by taking advantage of and killing people enduring extreme hardship, while leveraging AI forgeries and a well-honed smear campaign to label them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize economic inequality as overtly, but its villains enjoy obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, pushing them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one movie, sets the scrappy people of a struggling farm town against haughty aristocrats who live in extravagant sky-high mansions floating overhead. Remarkably, the agreeably goofy farcical update of *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to bring about global armageddon — to make money, needless to say.
There is little especially new in a series of movies presupposing that the wealthy have excessive influence, are devoid of conscience, and a endless, demanding desire for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and everyday folks are heroes" as a concept goes back to the dawn of cinema, with the Little Tramp's adventures pitting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against fat cats, industrialists, and clueless rich men. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that revised that very premise for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that affluence is incompatible with core morality, and applaud the neutralizing, downfall, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.
The Release That Changes Nothing
However, for some reason, we never get around to eating the rich. Every time elected officials respond to a public shooting event by faulting graphic media, I sigh with frustration, because if people truly were that impressionable — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the public consciousness — undoubtedly American society would not persistently idolize billionaires. Still the daily reports reveals every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans subconsciously equate riches with intelligence and importance, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies conveying the opposite.
If anything, it looks as though the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that gets in the way of real-world action. Offered a frequent serving of largely triumphant fables where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can finish the film satisfied about justice being served. These films are like moral fairy tales, pretending that the system works, and that determined protagonists will identify any malicious actors among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.
A More Pointed Tone in 2025
Even though 2025's movies do not break new ground in that sense, they indeed follow some modern developments among class warfare stories: They’re getting more enraged, sharper, more specific, and apparently more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory nowadays 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, selfish, cruel affluent villains were slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face directly on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the hauled off to jail finale, possibly since it’s become so obvious that the wealthy operate under their own legal rules, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."
The "behind bars" ending fails to deliver anymore. Rather, these villains are likely to perish at the final act of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.
Key Exclusions
There are exceptions, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself banished to the computer world, teasing that he is 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 exposed as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
