The Year's Biggest Films Told Us to Take Down the Elite Again. We Yet Ignore the Message.
A familiar theme permeates numerous 2025's popular films. This concept that stretches back in time to the era of the Little Tramp. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire exploiting his vast wealth to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events for personal gain. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the antagonist is a rich pharma-bro spending vast sums to trap the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a dynasty of ultra-rich lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and framed her for murder, purely for their financial benefit.
A Tradition of Cinematic Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin embodies a affluent bad guy running a TV network that makes millions by taking advantage of and killing people living in abject destitution, while leveraging deepfakes and a powerful smear campaign to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize economic inequality as overtly, but its evil characters enjoy conspicuous opulence while preying upon and oppressing Oz's poorest citizens, driving them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top film, contrasts the resourceful residents of a impoverished farm town against haughty aristocrats who live in extravagant sky-high mansions floating overhead. Even, the zany farcical update *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's scheme to trigger planetary doom — for financial gain, of course.
It is not particularly surprising in a string of movies assuming as fact that rich people have too much power, lack ethics or compassion, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for more wealth. "Elites are the bad guys and plucky heroes are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the early days of film, with the Little Tramp's adventures setting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against fat cats, bosses, 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 the exact same bit for the era of the exploitative, damaging Silicon Valley antagonist, the entire history of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that wealth is contrary to core morality, and applaud the overthrowing, defeat, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.
The Outlet That Fails to Transform
Nevertheless, inexplicably, we never get around to taking down the wealthy. Every time politicians follow a public shooting event by pointing fingers at popular entertainment, I sigh with frustration, because if people truly were that susceptible — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the public consciousness — certainly American society would not continue to revere billionaires. Still the headlines reveals constantly that a frightening percentage of Americans instinctively associate wealth with smartness and social worth, even after decades of the world's most beloved movies promoting a contradictory message.
If anything, it appears that the constant stream of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has provided us with a relief valve that gets in the way of substantive reform. Provided with a regular dose of largely happily-ever-after fables where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can walk away content about right prevailing. These stories are like ethical parables, pretending that society is just, and that determined protagonists will weed out any bad apples among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded through sheer effort.
A Sharper Edge in 2025
But while 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they certainly adhere to some recent trends among class warfare stories: They’re getting more furious, more pointed, more specific, and seemingly more violent. It’s rarely enough these days to see rich people gain some humility in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel affluent villains were eliminated by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a alien world (*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 rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the hauled off to jail conclusion, likely due to it’s become so clear that the wealthy live by a separate justice system, and are highly probable to purchase their freedom."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" ending fails to deliver anymore. Rather, these villains are apt to die at the end of their movies, often in notably horrific, fitting ways.
Key Outliers
Some films diverge, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up confined to the computer world, where he’s clearly being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is transformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
