The Year's Most Popular Movies Instructed Us to Take Down the Elite Again. We Still Aren't Listening.

An age-old motif permeates a host of 2025's genre movies. This concept that stretches all the way back to the era of silent film comedy. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a greedy, heartless billionaire exploiting his immense fortune to defame Earth's superhero icon while orchestrating world events for his own profit. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the villain is a rich pharma-bro squandering a fortune to throw the heroes into a monster-filled danger zone to boost his wealth. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who stole a kindly mom’s beneficial creation and framed her for murder, solely for their dynasty's gain.

A Lineage of On-Screen Elite Villainy

Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin embodies a rich antagonist controlling a TV network that profits hugely by taking advantage of and killing people enduring desperate poverty, while using digital impersonations and a well-honed media apparatus to depict them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn't highlight economic inequality quite that directly, but its antagonists reside in obvious luxury while taking advantage of and mistreating Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing movie, pits the resourceful residents of a impoverished farm town against arrogant elites who dwell in opulent gold-and-jade palaces above the clouds. Remarkably, the zany humorous remake *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's plot to trigger worldwide catastrophe — to make money, naturally.

There is little especially new in a series of movies taking it as a given that the affluent have disproportionate control, lack ethics or compassion, and a endless, demanding hunger for greater riches. "The wealthy are antagonists and everyday folks are heroes" as a plot device stretches back to the early days of film, with Chaplin’s silent movies pitting his chronically destitute beloved underdog against corporate bosses, industrialists, and bumbling wealthy fools. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that revised a similar story for the era of the exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the complete chronicle of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that affluence is at odds with fundamental decency, and applaud the neutralizing, defeat, and sometimes destruction of the rich and powerful.

The Outlet That Fails to Transform

And yet, somehow, we never actually consuming the elite. Whenever elected officials respond to a public shooting event by faulting popular entertainment, I roll my eyes, because if people truly were that susceptible — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the collective psyche — certainly American society would not persistently worship billionaires. And yet the news demonstrates every single day that a significant portion of Americans instinctively link affluence to competence and value to society, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies communicating the opposite.

If anything, it seems like the never-ending cycle of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a relief valve that hinders real-world action. Given a regular dose of largely uplifting fables where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are stripped of power and embarrassed, everyone can finish the film feeling good about right prevailing. These films are like moral fairy tales, suggesting that society is just, and that determined protagonists will weed out any corrupt individuals 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 sense, they indeed follow some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, more pointed, more direct, and apparently more lethal. It is seldom sufficient in the current era to see rich people gain some humility in empathy, 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, avaricious, malicious rich individuals were eliminated by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face directly on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were stabbed to death with a wine opener (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).

"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, likely due to it’s become so obvious that the wealthy function with a separate justice system, and are highly probable to buy their way out."

The "off to face justice" outcome fails to deliver anymore. Rather, these villains are likely to die at the conclusion of their movies, often in notably horrific, fitting ways.

Key Exceptions

There are exceptions, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself confined to the virtual grid, teasing that he is being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is redeemed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as culprits, but they don’t meet|avoid