The Year's Most Popular Movies Told Us to Take Down the Elite Again. We Continue to Aren't Listening.
A recurring idea runs through many of 2025's genre movies. It's an idea that goes far back to the era of Charlie Chaplin. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire wielding his immense fortune to tarnish Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events for his own profit. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the antagonist is a privileged biotech mogul spending vast sums to cast the heroes into a prehistoric arena to boost his wealth. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a family of extremely affluent lynxes who stole a altruistic inventor's life-changing idea and framed her for murder, solely for their financial benefit.
A Legacy of Cinematic Class Warfare
In *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate portrays a wealthy villain running a TV network that makes millions by exploiting and murdering people suffering through desperate poverty, while leveraging digital impersonations and a well-honed media apparatus to label them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn’t emphasize class division quite that directly, but its antagonists live in conspicuous opulence while preying upon and oppressing Oz's poorest citizens, driving them from their homes and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing box-office hit, pits the tough people of a struggling farm town against condescending upper classes who live in opulent gold-and-jade palaces floating overhead. Even, the agreeably goofy farcical update of *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plot to cause worldwide catastrophe — for financial gain, of course.
It is not inherently notable in a series of movies assuming as fact that rich people have excessive influence, no morals or empathy, and a endless, demanding desire for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a concept dates back to the early days of film, with Chaplin’s silent movies setting his perpetually impoverished iconic vagrant against tycoons, authority figures, and bumbling wealthy fools. From 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 exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the entire history of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that riches is at odds with core morality, and applaud the overthrowing, routing, and sometimes destruction of powerful, wealthy people.
The Catharsis That Fails to Transform
Nevertheless, inexplicably, we consistently fail to taking down the wealthy. On each occasion politicians react to a tragic gun violence event by faulting violent video games, I roll my eyes, because if people actually were that susceptible — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the public consciousness — undoubtedly American society wouldn’t still idolize billionaires. But the news reveals every single day that a significant portion of Americans instinctively associate wealth with intelligence and value to society, even after decades of cinema's biggest movies promoting a contradictory message.
In fact, it appears that the never-ending cycle of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has provided us with a relief valve that hinders meaningful change. Provided with a regular dose of predominantly triumphant tales where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can finish the film content about right prevailing. These films are like cautionary fables, pretending that institutions function, and that resourceful individuals will weed out any malicious actors among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who succeeded through sheer effort.
An Angrier Tone in 2025
Even though 2025's movies are not novel in that respect, they do follow some recent trends among class warfare stories: They’re getting angrier, more incisive, more targeted, and observably more violent. It’s rarely enough in the current era to see rich people learn a useful lesson 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, greedy, hateful rich individuals were eliminated by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and executed at close range on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the packed into a police car conclusion, likely due to it’s become so clear that the wealthy operate under a separate justice system, and are highly probable to negotiate their release."
The "behind bars" ending fails to deliver anymore. Instead, these villains are apt to perish at the final act of their movies, often in especially grotesque, ironic ways.
Notable Exceptions
Some films diverge, of course. The iconic villain in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up banished to the computer world, teasing that he is being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is transformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid
