2025's Most Popular Blockbusters Urged Us to Take Down the Elite Again. We Yet Ignore the Message.

A familiar motif courses through a host of 2025's genre movies. This concept that goes far back to the era of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the evil force is a envious, ruthless billionaire wielding his immense fortune to tarnish Earth's mightiest protector while controlling world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a privileged biotech mogul spending a fortune to throw the heroes into a monster-filled arena to boost his wealth. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a well-meaning mother's beneficial creation and framed her for murder, solely for their own profit.

A Tradition of Film Class Warfare

Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin portrays a affluent bad guy controlling a TV network that makes millions by exploiting and murdering people suffering through extreme hardship, while leveraging deepfakes and a well-honed media apparatus to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* is less direct about wealth disparity quite that directly, but its antagonists reside in clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top film, contrasts the tough inhabitants of a struggling farm town against haughty aristocrats who dwell in lavish gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Interestingly, the lighthearted comedy reboot of *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's scheme to cause global armageddon — for his own profit, needless to say.

It is not inherently notable in a series of movies presupposing that the affluent have too much power, are devoid of conscience, and a insatiable, privileged appetite for increased fortune. "The wealthy are antagonists and plucky heroes are heroes" as a concept goes back to the birth of movies, with early comedies contrasting his perpetually impoverished beloved underdog against tycoons, bosses, and clueless rich men. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that revised a similar story for the era of the rapacious, destructive entrepreneurial bad guy, the whole legacy of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that wealth is incompatible with core morality, and celebrate the defusing, defeat, and sometimes elimination of powerful, wealthy people.

The Release That Alters Little

However, somehow, we consistently fail to consuming the elite. On each occasion lawmakers respond to a public shooting event by faulting graphic media, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that susceptible — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the public consciousness — undoubtedly American society would not continue to idolize billionaires. Still the headlines reveals regularly that a frightening percentage of Americans instinctively associate wealth with competence and social worth, even after one hundred years of the world's most beloved movies communicating the opposite.

Actually, it seems like the endless parade of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has created a safety outlet that gets in the way of real-world action. Given a regular dose of mostly triumphant stories where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can leave the theater satisfied about good conquering evil. These films are like moral fairy tales, implying that society is just, and that determined protagonists will weed out any corrupt individuals among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.

A More Pointed Message in 2025

But while 2025's movies do not break new ground in that sense, they do follow some modern developments among class warfare stories: They’re getting more furious, sharper, more direct, and apparently more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory nowadays to see rich people learn a useful lesson in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful rich individuals were killed by mythological beasts (*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 at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a wine opener (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).

"Hardly any of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the packed into a police car finale, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that rich people operate under different standards, and are all too likely to buy their way out."

The "arrested and awaiting trial" ending no longer satisfies anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways.

Key Exceptions

There are exceptions, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself exiled to the computer world, teasing that he is being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is transformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid