2025's Top-Grossing Blockbusters Told Us to Take Down the Elite Yet Again. We Still Refuse to Listen.

A recurring idea permeates numerous 2025's popular films. This concept that goes all the way back to the time of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to defame Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events for personal gain. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the antagonist is a privileged biotech mogul investing a fortune to throw the heroes into a prehistoric death trap to boost his wealth. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a clan of super-wealthy lynxes who stole a well-meaning mother's beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their own profit.

A Legacy of On-Screen Class Warfare

Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate embodies a wealthy villain operating a TV network that makes millions by exploiting and murdering people living in desperate poverty, while using AI forgeries and a well-honed smear campaign to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about wealth disparity in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters enjoy obvious luxury while preying upon and oppressing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, pushing them from their homes and into bondage. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one movie, contrasts the tough inhabitants of a impoverished farm town against haughty aristocrats who live in lavish gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Remarkably, the zany farcical update *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plan to bring about global armageddon — for his own profit, naturally.

There is little particularly surprising in a series of movies presupposing that the affluent have too much power, no morals or empathy, and a endless, demanding appetite for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme stretches back to the birth of movies, with early comedies contrasting his always poor iconic vagrant against fat cats, authority figures, and inept, drunken millionaires. 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 Silicon Valley antagonist, the complete chronicle of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is contrary to fundamental decency, and exalt the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes demise of powerful, wealthy people.

The Release That Alters Little

And yet, inexplicably, we consistently fail to consuming the elite. Whenever elected officials react to a new mass shooting event by faulting violent video games, I feel exasperated, because if people truly were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the public consciousness — undoubtedly American society would not continue to revere billionaires. But the headlines reveals every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans subconsciously equate riches with competence and social worth, even after a century of the world's most beloved movies conveying the opposite.

Actually, it seems like the never-ending cycle of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that gets in the way of substantive reform. Offered a regular dose of predominantly uplifting fables where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can leave the theater content about justice being served. These movies are like cautionary fables, implying that society is just, and that resourceful individuals will weed out any corrupt individuals among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.

An Angrier Edge in 2025

But while 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they do follow some recent trends among class warfare stories: They’re getting angrier, more incisive, more targeted, and apparently more fatal. It is seldom sufficient nowadays to see rich people gain some humility in empathy, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious affluent villains were killed 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 gunned down directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and bludgeoned 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 clear that affluent individuals function with their own legal rules, and are very likely to negotiate their release."

The "arrested and awaiting trial" ending isn’t cathartic anymore. Instead, these villains are prone to meet their end at the final act of their movies, often in notably horrific, fitting ways.

Significant Exclusions

There are exceptions, undoubtedly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is simply humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up exiled to the computer world, where he’s clearly being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is reformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid