The Year's Top-Grossing Blockbusters Told Us to Consume the Wealthy Again. We Yet Aren't Listening.
An age-old motif courses through a host of 2025's popular films. This concept that stretches back in time to the days of Charlie Chaplin. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the antagonist is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire exploiting his enormous resources to defame Earth's mightiest protector while orchestrating world events to enrich himself. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a rich pharma-bro squandering vast sums to throw the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone for his own profit. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a clan of super-wealthy lynxes who pilfered a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and set her up for murder, purely for their own profit.
A Legacy of Cinematic Wealth Disparity
In *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin plays a wealthy villain controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by exploiting and murdering people enduring extreme hardship, while employing deepfakes and a sophisticated media apparatus to portray them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn’t emphasize wealth disparity as overtly, but its villains reside in conspicuous opulence while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing movie, contrasts the scrappy people of a impoverished farm town against haughty aristocrats who live in lavish gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Interestingly, the agreeably goofy humorous remake of *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plan to cause worldwide catastrophe — for his own profit, of course.
It is not especially new in a string of movies assuming as fact that the wealthy have too much power, are devoid of conscience, and a bottomless, entitled appetite for more wealth. "Rich people are villains and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a concept stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with early comedies contrasting his perpetually impoverished Little Tramp character against fat cats, bosses, and bumbling wealthy fools. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that revised the exact same bit for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the complete chronicle of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that wealth is contrary to fundamental decency, and applaud the neutralizing, defeat, and sometimes elimination of the rich and powerful.
The Catharsis That Alters Little
And yet, somehow, we never get around to taking down the wealthy. On each occasion politicians react to a new mass shooting event by faulting violent video games, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that easily influenced — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the public consciousness — undoubtedly American society would not continue to revere billionaires. But the daily reports reveals every single day that a frightening percentage of Americans innately equate riches with smartness and value to society, even after a century of cinema's biggest movies conveying the opposite.
Actually, it seems like the endless parade of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has given us a pressure release that impedes substantive reform. Provided with a steady diet of predominantly triumphant stories where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater feeling good about right prevailing. These films are like cautionary fables, pretending that the system works, and that plucky heroes will weed out any bad apples among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves by their bootstraps.
A Sharper Message in 2025
Although 2025's movies do not break new ground in that respect, they certainly adhere to some contemporary patterns among class warfare stories: They’re getting angrier, more pointed, more targeted, and apparently more fatal. It’s rarely enough in the current era to see rich people gain some humility in empathy, 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 slaughtered by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed directly on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an rising rival (*Him*).
"Very few of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the driven away in cuffs conclusion, possibly since it’s become so clear that affluent individuals operate under a separate justice system, and are all too likely to purchase their freedom."
The "behind bars" resolution fails to deliver anymore. Rather, these villains are likely to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.
Significant Exceptions
There are exceptions, undoubtedly. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up confined to the virtual grid, a setup that obviously being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* loses all his money and is reformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid
