This Year's Top-Grossing Blockbusters Urged Us to Take Down the Elite Again. We Yet Aren't Listening.

A familiar theme permeates many of 2025's popular films. This concept that stretches all the way back to the time of Charlie Chaplin. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire wielding his immense fortune to smear Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro squandering a fortune to throw the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone for personal amusement. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a dynasty of extremely affluent lynxes who pilfered a altruistic inventor's altruistic invention and pinned the blame on her for murder, all for their own profit.

A Tradition of On-Screen Class Warfare

In *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate portrays a affluent bad guy operating a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people suffering through extreme hardship, while employing AI forgeries and a well-honed smear campaign to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize economic inequality as overtly, but its villains enjoy conspicuous opulence while preying upon and oppressing Oz's most vulnerable population, pushing them from their homes and into bondage. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top film, sets the resourceful residents of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who live in lavish sky-high mansions above the clouds. Remarkably, the zany farcical update *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plan to bring about global armageddon — for his own profit, needless to say.

There is little particularly surprising in a series of movies presupposing that the wealthy have too much power, are devoid of conscience, and a insatiable, privileged hunger for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and plucky heroes are heroes" as a concept dates back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies setting his always poor iconic vagrant against fat cats, 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 updated a similar story for the era of the greedy, harmful entrepreneurial bad guy, the entire history of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that affluence is incompatible with basic human values, and exalt the defusing, routing, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.

The Catharsis That Changes Nothing

And yet, somehow, we never get around to consuming the elite. Every time politicians respond to a tragic gun violence event by pointing fingers at popular entertainment, I roll my eyes, because if people actually were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the societal mindset — surely American society would not persistently idolize billionaires. And yet the daily reports demonstrates constantly that a alarming number of Americans innately associate wealth with intelligence and social worth, even after one hundred years of history's most popular movies conveying a contradictory message.

Actually, it seems like the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has provided us with a pressure release that impedes substantive reform. Offered a regular dose of predominantly happily-ever-after stories where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away content about right prevailing. These movies are like ethical parables, implying that the system works, and that determined protagonists will root out any bad apples among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded through sheer effort.

A Sharper Edge in 2025

Although 2025's movies are not novel in that regard, they certainly adhere to some contemporary patterns among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, more pointed, more targeted, and observably more violent. It is seldom sufficient nowadays to see rich people be taught a lesson in humility, 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 wealthy people were slaughtered by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face at close range on live TV (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an ambitious rival (*Him*).

"Almost none of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the hauled off to jail ending, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that the wealthy operate under their own legal rules, and are very likely to buy their way out."

The "off to face justice" outcome no longer satisfies anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to meet their end at the final act of their movies, often in notably horrific, fitting ways.

Significant Outliers

Some films diverge, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up exiled to the virtual grid, a setup that obviously being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is reformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid