2025's Top-Grossing Movies Told Us to Consume the Wealthy Again. We Still Refuse to Listen.

A familiar motif courses through many of 2025's blockbuster hits. This concept which extends back in time to the time of silent film comedy. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire using his immense fortune to tarnish Earth's mightiest protector while orchestrating world events for his own profit. In *Jurassic World: Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro spending tens of millions to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed arena for his own profit. In *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a dynasty of super-wealthy lynxes who appropriated a well-meaning mother's beneficial creation and set her up for murder, purely for their dynasty's gain.

A Legacy of Film Wealth Disparity

In the remake of *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate portrays a affluent bad guy controlling a TV network that earns a fortune by preying upon and eliminating people suffering through abject destitution, while leveraging digital impersonations and a sophisticated media apparatus to label them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight wealth disparity in such a blunt manner, but its villains live in clear extravagance while preying upon and oppressing Oz's poorest citizens, pushing them into unemployment and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing movie, sets the resourceful inhabitants of a struggling farm town against condescending upper classes who dwell in opulent sky-high mansions floating overhead. Even, the agreeably goofy humorous remake of *The Naked Gun* revolves around a billionaire's plot to bring about global armageddon — for his own profit, needless to say.

It is not inherently notable in a run of movies presupposing that the affluent have excessive influence, lack ethics or compassion, and a insatiable, privileged appetite for greater riches. "Elites are the bad guys and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a concept goes back to the dawn of cinema, with the Little Tramp's adventures pitting his chronically destitute iconic vagrant against tycoons, industrialists, and clueless rich men. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that revised that very premise for the era of the greedy, harmful tech-bro villain, the complete chronicle of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that affluence is incompatible with fundamental decency, and exalt the neutralizing, routing, and sometimes destruction of powerful, wealthy people.

The Outlet That Changes Nothing

However, somehow, we never actually consuming the elite. Every time politicians react to a public shooting event by pointing fingers at graphic media, I feel exasperated, because if people actually were that impressionable — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the public consciousness — surely American society wouldn’t still revere billionaires. And yet the headlines reveals constantly that a frightening percentage of Americans instinctively equate riches with smartness and value to society, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies conveying the opposite.

In fact, it appears that the never-ending cycle of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has created a pressure release that gets in the way of meaningful change. Offered a steady diet of predominantly triumphant fables where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can leave the theater feeling good about good conquering evil. These movies are like ethical parables, implying that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will root out any malicious actors among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded by their bootstraps.

A Sharper Edge in 2025

Although 2025's movies do not break new ground in that sense, they do follow some modern developments among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more furious, sharper, more direct, and observably more fatal. It’s rarely enough in the current era to see rich people be taught a lesson about modesty, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or lose their money to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious rich individuals were slaughtered by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a distant sphere (*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 assaulted fatally by an rising rival (*Him*).

"Hardly any of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the packed into a police car ending, likely due to it’s become so clear that the wealthy live by different standards, and are very likely to buy their way out."

The "off to face justice" ending isn’t cathartic anymore. Rather, these villains are likely to perish at the end of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.

Notable Exceptions

A few stories differ, certainly. 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, teasing that he is being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is reformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as thieves and liars, but they don’t meet|avoid