This Year's Most Popular Blockbusters Urged Us to Take Down the Elite Again. We Yet Refuse to Listen.

An age-old theme courses through a host of 2025's genre movies. It's an idea that stretches all the way back to the era of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a envious, ruthless billionaire using his immense fortune to tarnish Earth's mightiest protector while manipulating world events for personal gain. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the villain is a rich pharma-bro investing vast sums to trap the heroes into a prehistoric death trap for his own profit. In *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who stole a well-meaning mother's beneficial creation and pinned the blame on her for murder, solely for their financial benefit.

A Legacy of Film Class Warfare

In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by taking advantage of and killing people suffering through desperate poverty, while using deepfakes and a sophisticated propaganda machine to label them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about economic inequality in such a blunt manner, but its antagonists reside in obvious luxury while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's poorest citizens, forcing them into unemployment and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top movie, sets the resourceful people of a struggling farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit extravagant sky-high mansions in the sky. Interestingly, the zany humorous remake *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to cause worldwide catastrophe — to make money, naturally.

There is little particularly surprising in a string of movies presupposing that the affluent have too much power, lack ethics or compassion, and a bottomless, entitled desire for more wealth. "Elites are the bad guys and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme goes back to the dawn of cinema, with the Little Tramp's adventures setting his chronically destitute beloved underdog against fat cats, authority figures, and bumbling wealthy fools. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that updated the exact same bit for the era of the exploitative, damaging Silicon Valley antagonist, the complete chronicle of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that affluence is contrary to core morality, and celebrate the defusing, routing, and sometimes demise of powerful, wealthy people.

The Catharsis That Alters Little

However, inexplicably, we never actually taking down the wealthy. Every time politicians react to a tragic gun violence event by blaming graphic media, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that susceptible — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the collective psyche — certainly American society wouldn’t still worship billionaires. But the headlines demonstrates every single day that a significant portion of Americans subconsciously link affluence to competence and importance, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies conveying the opposite.

If anything, it seems like the endless parade of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that gets in the way of substantive reform. Offered a steady diet of predominantly uplifting stories where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can walk away satisfied about good conquering evil. These stories are like ethical parables, pretending that society is just, and that plucky heroes will identify any malicious actors among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves on their own merit.

A Sharper Edge in 2025

But while 2025's movies do not break new ground in that respect, they certainly adhere to some recent trends among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, more pointed, more targeted, and apparently more fatal. It is no longer satisfactory in the current era to see rich people gain some humility about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they subjugated, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious wealthy people were eliminated by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down directly on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).

"Almost none of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the hauled off to jail ending, 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 "behind bars" resolution isn’t cathartic anymore. Conversely, these villains are apt to die at the end of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.

Key Exclusions

There are exceptions, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is only 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 possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is reformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid