2025's Biggest Blockbusters Instructed 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 notion that stretches all the way back to the days of Charlie Chaplin. Within the DCU reboot *Superman*, the evil force is a envious, ruthless billionaire wielding his immense fortune to smear Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events for personal gain. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the antagonist is a rich pharma-bro investing a fortune to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed death trap to boost his wealth. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the wrongdoers are a clan of extremely affluent lynxes who appropriated a well-meaning mother's altruistic invention and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their dynasty's gain.
A Tradition of On-Screen Class Warfare
In the remake of *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate plays a wealthy villain operating a TV network that makes millions by taking advantage of and killing people enduring desperate poverty, while employing deepfakes and a well-honed smear campaign to depict them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The Oz-based film *Wicked* doesn’t emphasize wealth disparity quite that directly, but its villains enjoy conspicuous opulence while preying upon and oppressing Oz's poorest citizens, driving them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, contrasts the tough inhabitants of a hardscrabble farm town against haughty aristocrats who inhabit opulent gleaming towers in the sky. Remarkably, the zany farcical update *The Naked Gun* centers on a billionaire's scheme to cause worldwide catastrophe — to make money, naturally.
It is not especially new in a series of movies assuming as fact that the wealthy have excessive influence, are devoid of conscience, and a endless, demanding appetite for greater riches. "The wealthy are antagonists and everyday folks are heroes" as a theme stretches back to the birth of movies, with Chaplin’s silent movies contrasting his always poor beloved underdog against corporate bosses, authority figures, and bumbling wealthy fools. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that revised a similar story for the era of the greedy, harmful entrepreneurial bad guy, the complete chronicle of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that wealth is at odds with basic human values, and exalt the overthrowing, defeat, and sometimes destruction of powerful, wealthy people.
The Outlet That Fails to Transform
Nevertheless, for some reason, we never get around to taking down the wealthy. Whenever elected officials respond to a public shooting event by blaming violent video games, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that susceptible — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the collective psyche — undoubtedly American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. And yet the headlines demonstrates every single day that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously equate riches with smartness and social worth, even after decades of the world's most beloved movies promoting the opposite.
If anything, it seems like the endless parade of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that hinders meaningful change. Provided with a steady diet of largely triumphant stories where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can walk away content about justice being served. These stories are like moral fairy tales, implying that institutions function, and that determined protagonists will root out any corrupt individuals among the mostly hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
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 more enraged, more pointed, more specific, and observably more violent. It is seldom sufficient nowadays to see rich people gain some humility in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful wealthy people were slaughtered by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face point blank on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the driven away in cuffs ending, likely due to it’s become so apparent that rich people live by a separate justice system, and are all too likely to buy their way out."
The "arrested and awaiting trial" outcome no longer satisfies anymore. Instead, these villains are likely to perish at the conclusion of their movies, often in especially grotesque, ironic ways.
Significant Outliers
A few stories differ, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is merely humiliated, exposed, and sent to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up confined to the digital realm, a setup that obviously being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is reformed as a person. The Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
