The Year's Most Popular Films Urged Us to Consume the Wealthy Again. We Continue to Aren't Listening.
A familiar idea courses through a host of 2025's popular films. This concept which extends far back to the time of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire wielding his immense fortune to tarnish Earth's mightiest protector while manipulating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a wealthy pharmaceutical heir spending vast sums to cast the heroes into a prehistoric arena for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a clan of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a well-meaning mother's beneficial creation and framed her for murder, all for their dynasty's gain.
A Tradition of On-Screen Elite Villainy
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin embodies a wealthy villain running a TV network that makes millions by preying upon and eliminating people enduring abject destitution, while employing digital impersonations and a well-honed media apparatus to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize class division in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters live in obvious luxury while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, pushing them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, sets the resourceful inhabitants of a impoverished farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit lavish gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Interestingly, the lighthearted humorous remake of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to trigger global armageddon — for his own profit, of course.
It is not especially new in a run of movies taking it as a given that the affluent have excessive influence, are devoid of conscience, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for greater riches. "Elites are the bad guys and plucky heroes are heroes" as a concept dates back to the birth of movies, with early comedies contrasting his chronically destitute iconic vagrant against corporate bosses, industrialists, and bumbling wealthy fools. Beginning with 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 greedy, harmful Silicon Valley antagonist, the whole legacy of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is at odds with core morality, and celebrate the defusing, routing, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.
The Outlet That Alters Little
However, somehow, we never get around to consuming the elite. Every time lawmakers follow a tragic gun violence event by faulting violent video games, I sigh with frustration, because if people really were that impressionable — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the societal mindset — certainly American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. And yet the news reveals every single day that a significant portion of Americans instinctively associate wealth with intelligence and social worth, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies communicating the reverse.
Actually, it appears that the endless parade of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that gets in the way of substantive reform. Given a frequent serving of mostly triumphant stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can leave the theater feeling good about justice being served. These movies are like moral fairy tales, implying that institutions function, and that resourceful individuals will identify any corrupt individuals among the largely hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded on their own merit.
A More Pointed Message in 2025
But while 2025's movies do not break new ground in that regard, they do follow some modern developments among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting angrier, more incisive, more specific, and apparently more violent. It’s rarely enough nowadays to see rich people learn a useful lesson about modesty, 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 killed by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face at close range on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed 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 conclusion, perhaps because it’s become so apparent that the wealthy operate under different standards, and are all too likely to buy their way out."
The "off to face justice" outcome no longer satisfies anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to die at the end of their movies, often in notably grotesque, ironic ways.
Significant Outliers
A few stories differ, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up exiled 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 reformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
