The Year's Top-Grossing Movies Urged Us to Consume the Wealthy Again. We Yet Refuse to Listen.

A recurring motif runs through many of 2025's genre movies. This notion which extends all the way back to the time of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the antagonist is a jealous, sociopathic billionaire using his enormous resources to defame Earth's greatest hero while controlling world events for personal gain. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the bad guy is a rich pharma-bro squandering vast sums to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed danger zone for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the villains are a dynasty of super-wealthy lynxes who stole a altruistic inventor's altruistic invention and pinned the blame on her for murder, purely for their own profit.

A Tradition of Film Wealth Disparity

Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, a wealthy media magnate plays a rich antagonist operating a TV network that makes millions by exploiting and murdering people living in abject destitution, while leveraging deepfakes and a powerful media apparatus to depict them as selfish, shiftless, dangerous criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight class division quite that directly, but its antagonists reside in conspicuous opulence while preying upon and oppressing Oz's most vulnerable population, forcing them from their homes and into bondage. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's number one box-office hit, contrasts the scrappy inhabitants of a struggling farm town against condescending upper classes who live in extravagant sky-high mansions floating overhead. Even, the zany comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plan to trigger planetary doom — for his own profit, needless to say.

There’s nothing particularly surprising in a run of movies taking it as a given that the wealthy have disproportionate control, no morals or empathy, and a endless, demanding appetite for increased fortune. "Elites are the bad guys and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme goes back to the birth of movies, with early comedies setting his perpetually impoverished beloved underdog against corporate bosses, industrialists, and clueless rich men. Beginning with 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 rapacious, destructive entrepreneurial bad guy, the complete chronicle of cinema is filled with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that affluence is incompatible with core morality, and exalt the defusing, downfall, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.

The Outlet That Fails to Transform

However, for some reason, we never get around to consuming the elite. On each occasion lawmakers follow a public shooting event by pointing fingers at popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that impressionable — if frequent consumption to an idea via media was enough to make it seep the societal mindset — certainly American society would not continue to idolize billionaires. Still the headlines reveals regularly that a alarming number of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with competence and social worth, even after decades of the world's most beloved movies promoting the reverse.

If anything, it seems like the never-ending cycle of anti-wealth storylines in American cinema has provided us with a safety outlet that hinders substantive reform. Provided with a steady diet of largely happily-ever-after fables where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can walk away feeling good about justice being served. These films are like ethical parables, suggesting that society is just, and that resourceful individuals will identify any bad apples among the largely industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who succeeded on their own merit.

A Sharper Message in 2025

Even though 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they certainly adhere to some modern developments among anti-wealth stories: They’re getting more enraged, sharper, more direct, 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 exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, selfish, cruel affluent villains were killed by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and eaten by a giant mutant dinosaur (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a alien world (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down point blank on national television (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and bludgeoned by an rising rival (*Him*).

"Almost none of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the driven away in cuffs conclusion, perhaps because it’s become so clear that rich people function with their own legal rules, and are highly probable to negotiate their release."

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

Notable Exceptions

Some films diverge, undoubtedly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Sinful schemer Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up exiled to the computer world, where he’s clearly 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 Lynxley family members in *Zootopia 2* are revealed to be frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid