The Year's Most Popular Movies Told Us to Consume the Wealthy Once More. We Yet Refuse to Listen.

A recurring idea permeates a host of 2025's genre movies. It's an idea that goes all the way back to the era of silent film comedy. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his vast wealth to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the villain is a rich pharma-bro squandering tens of millions to throw the heroes into a prehistoric arena to boost his wealth. In *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and framed her for murder, purely for their dynasty's gain.

A Legacy of On-Screen Elite Villainy

In *The Running Man*, the antagonist plays a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people suffering through abject destitution, while employing AI forgeries and a sophisticated media apparatus to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. *Wicked: For Good* is less direct about class division quite that directly, but its antagonists reside in clear extravagance while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, driving them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing film, contrasts the scrappy residents of a struggling farm town against haughty aristocrats who dwell in lavish sky-high mansions floating overhead. Remarkably, the zany farcical update of *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plan to trigger planetary doom — for financial gain, naturally.

There’s nothing especially new in a series of movies taking it as a given that rich people have too much power, are devoid of conscience, and a insatiable, privileged appetite for more wealth. "Elites are the bad guys and plucky heroes are heroes" as a concept dates back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies setting his chronically destitute iconic vagrant against fat cats, bosses, and inept, drunken millionaires. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that revised that very premise for the era of the greedy, harmful tech-bro villain, the entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that riches is incompatible with core morality, and applaud the neutralizing, defeat, and sometimes destruction of elite figures.

The Release That Changes Nothing

Nevertheless, somehow, we never actually eating the rich. On each occasion elected officials follow a public shooting event by blaming graphic media, I sigh with frustration, because if people actually were that easily influenced — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the societal mindset — undoubtedly American society would not continue to worship billionaires. And yet the news reveals regularly that a significant portion of Americans innately associate wealth with smartness and value to society, even after a century of cinema's biggest movies promoting a contradictory message.

If anything, it seems like the constant stream of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that hinders meaningful change. Given a frequent serving of largely triumphant tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can walk away content about good conquering evil. These stories are like ethical parables, pretending that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will identify any malicious actors among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.

A Sharper Message in 2025

Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they do follow some recent trends among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting angrier, more pointed, more targeted, and observably more fatal. It is seldom sufficient in the current era to see rich people be taught a lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful rich individuals were killed by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down at close range on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).

"Hardly any of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the packed into a police car ending, likely due to it’s become so apparent that affluent individuals function with different standards, and are very likely to buy their way out."

The "arrested and awaiting trial" resolution no longer satisfies anymore. Conversely, these villains are prone to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in especially grotesque, ironic ways.

Significant Exclusions

There are exceptions, certainly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up exiled to the virtual grid, teasing that he is being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is redeemed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid